OAuth 2.0 and OIDC

This chapter is going to get you started on the technical journey to understand the advanced concepts that will be covered in the following chapters.

In this chapter, we are going to learn about the basics of the most used authentication protocol for cloud applications, which is OAuth 2.0, and we are going to appreciate why OAuth 2.0 has become the de facto standard in web authentication.

This chapter will also introduce you to OpenID Connect (OIDC).

OIDC extends the OAuth 2.0 protocol by introducing new flows, reusing some existing ones, and making the user, not the application, the center of these flows.

In this chapter, we will go through and learn all about the basics of OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, their similarities and differences, where they can be used and why, and what the actors that participate in authentication and/or authorization flows are.

This chapter will not analyze the flows of these protocols in depth; those will be covered in the next...