Engineering OAuth

Engineering OAuth: Architectures, Security Practices, and Implementation Patterns offers a definitive, practitioner-focused exploration of the OAuth family of protocols, tracing their historical evolution and situating them within the broader authentication and authorization landscape. It begins by clarifying the security problems that motivated OAuth's design, introducing foundational terminology, trust relationships, and common deployment scenarios so readers can confidently tackle design trade-offs across web, cloud, and API-driven systems.

The book provides a rigorous, implementation-minded breakdown of OAuth 2.0 and related specs: actor roles, server responsibilities, token formats and lifecycles, grant types and consent flows, and permission modeling. Emphasizing security at every layer, it explains real-world attacks (CSRF, token leakage, redirect URI manipulation, and more), prescribes concrete mitigations, and offers operational guidance for building robust authorization servers, securing resource servers, integrating external identity providers, and meeting scalability, auditability, and regulatory requirements.

Specialized chapters address practical patterns for diverse client environments-web, native mobile, IoT, and enterprise-while unpacking essential extensions like OpenID Connect, token exchange, and User-Managed Access. The book concludes with actionable advice for containerized and hybrid cloud deployments, plus best practices for testing, monitoring, and long-term maintenance. Designed for engineers, architects, and security leaders, it equips teams to deliver trustworthy, scalable, and future-proof federated access platforms.