Andy Baio writes in Wired about the privacy dangers of OAuth.
While OAuth enables OAuth Providers to replace passwords with tokens to improve the security of authentication and authorization to third party applications, in many cases it gives those applications access to much more of your personal information than is needed for them to perform their functions. This only increases the risk associated with breaches of personal data at these third party application providers.
Andy focuses on Gmail because the risk of using them as an OAuth Provider is greater. As Andy says:
“For Twitter, the consequences are unlikely to be serious since almost all activity is public. For Facebook, a mass leak of private Facebook photos could certainly be embarrassing. But for Gmail, I’m very concerned that it opens a major security flaw that’s begging to be exploited.
“You may trust Google to keep your email safe, but do you trust a three-month-old Y Combinator-funded startup created by three college kids? Or a side project from an engineer working in his 20 percent time? How about a disgruntled or curious employee of one of these third-party services?”
If you are using your GMail (Google) credentials to just authenticate to a third party application, why should the third party application have access to your emails? In the case of Xobni or Unsubscribe, for example, you do need to give them access rights because they are providing specific functions that need access to Gmail content. But why does Unsubscribe need access to message content when all it really needs is access to email senders? When you decided to use Unsubscribe, why can’t you limit them to only your Senders? The bottom line is that by using OAuth you are trusting the third party applications not to abuse the privileges you are giving them and that they have implemented effective security controls.
While Andy provides some good advice to people who use their Google, Twitter, or Facebook credentials for other applications, there is no technical reason for the third party applications to get access to so much personal information. In other words, when you allow a third party application to use one of your primary applications (OAuth Providers) for authentication and/or authorization, you should be able to control the functions and data to which the third party has access. In order for this to happen, the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters must build in more fine-grained access controls.
At present, the OAuth providers do not seem to be motivated to limit access to user content by third party applications based on the needs of those applications. One reason might be that most users simply don’t realize how much access they are giving to third party applications when they use an OAuth Provider. With no user pressure requesting finer grained access, why would the OAuth Providers bother?
Aside from lack of user pressure, it seems to me that the OAuth Providers are economically motivated to maintain the status quo for two reasons. First, they are competing with each other to become the cornerstone for their users’ online lives and want keep the OAuth user interface as simple as possible. In other words, if authorization is too fine grained, users will have too many choices and will decide not to use that OAuth Provider. Second, the OAuth Providers want to keep things as simple as possible for third party developers to attract them.
I would hate to see the Federal Government get involved to force the OAuth Providers to provide more fine-grained access control. But I am afraid that a few highly publicized breaches will have that affect.
As Enterprises are moving to a Zero Trust Model, so must consumers.
