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Asked: 2026-06-09T03:46:56+00:00

Wrapping my old-fashioned head around OAuth…. Aside from the request/response mechanics and the Authorize

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Wrapping my old-fashioned head around OAuth….

Aside from the request/response mechanics and the Authorize / Authenticate round trips (which I think I underdstand) I am struggling with mapping my MyUser object (whatever that may contain) to an OAuth token, if (actually when, not if) the user kills any cookies (encrypted or otherwise) I may have dropped on the browser.

I get MyUser info at the original Login (call it ‘registration’ for my site) but now MyUser comes back, all cookies are gone so he is just ‘user’. Fair enough, user has to do an OAuth login again, but now I have no way of associating the new Token / Secret with MyUser data.

What am I missing?

— edit Aug 2/2012 —–

Let me restate this (I am pretty sure I am being thick about this but guess thats what here is for):

As pointed out in Replies, each OAuth provider has their own mechanism. We can navigate those and get back an access Token for the user.

Lets say Hero registers on my site using Facebook. FB returns his FB UserID and Name along with the Access Token. We are clever enough to request and get his FB Email, and we ask him some other registration q’s before letting him in. Then we save this in our datastore (linked to our own User record):

OurUserId : 1234
oAuthProviderName : Facebook
oAUthProviderUserId: xxxxx
oAuthProviderUserEmail: hero@mlb.com
oAuthProviderUserName: iBeHero
oAuthToken: entracingly-unique-string-of-goop
oAuthSecret: moredata
.... etc.

and set a cookie to identify him as our user# 1234.

Now Hero goes away, kills his cookies for some reason, and then comes back to us.

Now he decides to Log In with Twitter. I have no cookie so I don’t know who he is, and we go through the process again.

To me he looks like a new user so once Twitter sends me a Token I start asking him Registration questions, clearly not right.

Turns out Twitter doesn’t return an Email address so I can’t match that, and even if they did (I think almost everyone else does) Hero likley has more than one Email.

It seems to me that the only tie I have between the two (or however many) logins is whatever cookies I set that have not been deleted.

Are we saying that the entire OAuth2.0 mechanism hangs on this? I can’t belive that is right, but don’t see another way, so I must be missing something , yes?

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  1. Editorial Team

    If you’re using OAuth as a login mechanism as well, then make sure whichever provider you’re talking to has some way of returning back a stable ID for a user. That ID is the key you’d use for looking up the user in your DB.

    Different providers have different ways of doing this. For Google, details on how to do authentication with OAuth 2.0 are here. For Twitter, they use OAuth 1.0 and return the user ID when exchanging the code for an access token. Facebook has its own way of doing it as well.

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