Other forms of protection

Using CSRF tokens may be a convenient way to protect your app from CSRF attacks, but it can be a hassle at times. As mentioned in the previous section, what about the times when you need to expose an API to allow mobile access? Or, your app is growing so quickly that you want to accelerate that growth by creating a Graph API of your own.

How do you manage it then?

In this section, we will go quickly over the techniques for protection.

Creating your own app ID and app secret – OAuth-styled

Creating your own app ID and app secret is similar to what the major Internet companies are doing right now: we require developers to sign up for developing accounts and to attach an application ID and secret key for each of the apps.

Using this information, the developers will need to exchange OAuth credentials in order to make any API calls, as shown in the following screenshot:

Google requires developers to sign up, and it assigns the client ID

On the server end, all you need...