Question

If I built an application that accessed some of the data from say Gmail, Twitter and Facebook, and I want the user to be able to only have to enter their authentication info once, and it’s reset after some days or weeks, what is the best way to do this, dynamically, in Ruby?

I see a lot of people just having a config file of their clients’/users’ credentials like so:

gmail_account:
    username: myClient
    password: myClientsPassword

This seems a) like it’s very insecure, and b) it wouldn’t work if I wanted to store this kind of information for thousands of users. What is the recommended way to do this?

I would like to be able to build an interface on top of these services, so having to enter credentials every time the user made a transaction isn’t feasible.

Answer 1

If you’re comforatable with the potential liability when a hacker gets into your database / filesystem, then go for it. And in all fairness, you should also disclose to your users that their passwords will be stored on your system, and let them decide if they want to give your program that level of trust.

But why do this in the first place? Facebook Connect and Twitter & Google using OAuth there’s no need for you to store user passwords at all. At some point a user’s cookies will expire (or they’ll try to access your site from another computer) and they’ll have to re-authenticate. You can’t prevent re-authentication – instead, you should make it as easy for the end user to handle as possible.