Leveraging Google to authenticate users
Do you dread the thought of managing users and their passwords? Many security teams buy large products to deal with all this. Teams even invest in tools to simply push password resets directly to users, to reduce call volume.
Long story short, user management is a major effort not to be taken lightly; hence, many teams turn to OAuth. Described as “an open standard for access delegation” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth), OAuth provides a way to outsource user management almost entirely.
OAuth arose as social media applications emerged. A user of a third-party Twitter app used to store their password directly in the app. Not only was this inconvenient when users wanted to change their password, but it was a major security risk!
OAuth lets the application move away from this by instead reaching out to the social media site directly. The user logs in with the social media site, and the site hands back a special token to...
