OAuth: The Next Big Thing in Security

Sam Ramji @sramjiApigee sramji@apigee.com

+1-510-913-6495

groups.google.com/group/api-craft

THE PLATFORMIMPERATIVE

Every market in history has had intermediaries

Business CustomersIntermediaries

These intermediaries connect buyers and sellers by knowing what both want and creating convenient ways to transact

Apps are the new intermediaries.

Business CustomersApps

They occupy many niches already and continue to multiply

Data from Wikipedia

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App Store Growth 2008-2011

Apps AvailableTotal App Down-loads

As do devices.

Mary MeekerKleiner Perkins

Companies cannot build for all these niches as each one requires distinct expertise in design and development, and there are too many niches.

As Marc Andreessen observed recently

Marc Andreessen

“ In short, software is eating the world.

We are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

Evans, Hagiu, and Schmalensee explored this deeply in 2006

And Annabelle Gawer has formalized the solution

The platform business model.

PLATFORMSAREOPEN

As we’ve learned from digital natives like

open platforms grow the fastest.

Visualization by Apigee

In the API era of competition, speed is crucial because critical mass leads rapidly to market dominance.

[Ecosystem Competition]

Kishore S. Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, Accenture

Open platforms mean that apps can be built by developers quickly

without formal commitment to joint research, joint development, and joint marketing.

Open platforms decouple partners from the platform provider’s business cycles.

This reduces the cost of innovation,

enabling many more experiments to be made more quickly,

increasing the chance of a major improvement to the platform business, its customers, and its intermediaries.

This is low-friction innovation.

OPENDOES NOT MEANSECURE

This takes us to the stakes required for a digital business in the API era.

For an intermediary to connect a buyer and seller, there must be trust.

The intermediary must be trustworthy, and the transaction must be trustworthy.

In modern businesses, buyers (users)have accounts with sellers (providers)

which are filled with data as well as transaction privileges.

without breaking their relationship with the seller.

For the system to function well,buyers must be able to fire their intermediary

With apps as the intermediary, new dynamics exist on top of the historical foundation.

Apps are new.

They are often short-lived.

Their business model depends on building a high volume of users.

They must have some way to attain their first transaction and be proven or else improved.

And this way must align with the loose coupling philosophy at the heart of an open platform

otherwise we’ve just secured our way back into old-fashioned closed businesses

and killed our platform opportunity.

James GovernorRedmonk

“ 20th Century IT was about raising barriers to entry for competitors.

21st Century IT is about lowering barriers to participation.

So how do you build a trustworthy system in an open world?

It takes an open security architecture.

INTRODUCINGOAUTH

and it’s the right choice for securing open platforms.

It’s a free and open protocol

built on licenses from the Open Web Foundation

The Valet Key Metaphor

Eran Hammer-Lahav compares the OAuth model to a valet key.

This is an apt metaphor.

A Valet Key for Open Platforms

The heart of OAuth is an authorization token with limited rights

which the user can revoke at any timeshould they become suspicious or dissatisfied with the app they’re using to access your business.

When the token is first granted

the business shows the user what rights the app is asking for

and this negotiation is invisible to the app.

A perfect design for bootstrapping trust.

Just Enough Permission

An app should have just enough permission to do the things the user wants it to.

OAuth allows for granular access to the user’s account.

The current alternative is all or none

Give the app your username and password – which gives the app access to everything about you.

In OAuth, permissions can be gracefully upgraded as well.

If the user tries to do something in an app and they haven’t authorized the corresponding permission, the business can give the users the option to add that permission, using the bootstrapping sequence used to grant the token in the first place.

Just Enough Responsibility

App developers are not security experts.

A developer’s job is to make software that does what it is supposed to do.

A security expert’s job is to make sure software never does what it is not supposed to do.

App developers DO NOT WANT the responsibility of holding a user’s secret information.

Usernames and passwords, Credit card and banking information,Lifetime history of everyone you’ve emailed

These are heavy secrets and require heavy security.

The right place for these is within your own business, secured by your own experts and your own infrastructure investments.

Decoupling partners from these challenges

keeps security consistent

with the open platform potential for low-friction innovation.

THE OAUTHIMPERATIVE

The most popular intermediariesare connecting buyers with several complementary sellers at the same time

That increases their value to the buyer

but also multiplies the difficulty and risk of security

If one app holds secrets for many businesses

that app becomes the highest-risk part of the system.

As more businesses follow the platform imperative and add APIs

there is an imperative for the healthy growth of the market through the new intermediaries.

The imperative is to make it easy for developers to build great apps that can delight users and grow businesses.

The imperative is for businessesto standardize on OAuth.

“We have our own version of OAuth”

“We invented something that’s kind of like OAuth”

The imperative is to make it easy for developers to build great apps that can delight users and grow businesses.

The imperative is for businessesto standardize on OAuth.

No developers were harmed in the production of this presentation.

THANK YOUQuestions and ideas to:

@sramjisramji@apigee.com +1-510-913-6495

groups.google.com/group/api-craft