OAuth Will Murder Your Children

http://zachholman.com/2011/01/oauth_will_murder_your_children/

by holman • 15 years ago

380 99 15 years ago

gnok2• 15 years ago

This is a crucial step for safeguarding privacy/security if OAuth is to become more prevalent.

Any app may request any number of permissions from me; but I as a user should be able to choose what permissions it gets. I would take this one step further and allow the user to retroactively withdraw permissions (OAuth already allows for asking the user for additional permissions).

EGreg• 15 years ago

The problem with twitter in particular is that it lets you do two things: read and post messages. What granular options do you see?

gnok2• 15 years ago

His post wasn't Twitter specific; he just used Twitter as an example.

But since you asked, here's a couple I can think of: * A rate limit on the number of Tweets per hour/day/week * Ability to follow or unfollow * Ability to index my tweets if they're private

mjuhl24• 15 years ago

You can do a lot more than that with twitter:

1. Read Tweets 2. Write Tweets 3. Read direct messages 4. Write direct messages 5. Follow someone 6. Unfollow someone 7. Create a list 8. Add to a list 9. Remove from list 10. Delete List 11. Edit profile information/avatar ..etc...

bryanlarsen• 15 years ago

Android needs this too, perhaps even more than OAuth does.

orangecat• 15 years ago

My first thought as well. It annoys me when apps add optional "sharing" features that require access to my contact list, and there's no way to allow the app to run without those permissions. And the Internet and SD card permissions are too coarse-grained; developers should be able to list specific directories and hosts that the app can access.

pretz• 15 years ago

Trust me, as an app developer it annoys me too that there's no easy way for me to allow users to opt-out of contacts access. Making a second app is just too complicated.

RossM• 15 years ago

I think that Android needs it to go a bit further by differentiating between required permissions and optional ones. Having them all optional could cause the app to plain not work (no, Handcent can't send messages) or users would just block apps that request internet access for fetching adverts from doing so.

However, I'd welcome annotations for exactly why an app requires each permission.

judofyr2• 15 years ago

Even better: Let the application also say why it needs the permission:

    * Read access
        We want to analyse your tweets
    * Read/write
        Because we want to spam your friends

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

Would be cool. But really, I don't think people will double-guess themselves when QuizMatic3000 doesn't give reasons for it. (An age-old UX myth: users never read dialog boxes, they just click OK.)

jacquesm4• 15 years ago

One fearless developer I worked with would switch the meaning of the boxes every now and then to 'train' the users not to ignore the texts based on negative feedback.

  +------------------------------------------------------+
  |                                                      |
  |     Are you really sure you don't want to format ?   |
  |                                                      |
  |                   <yes>     <no>                     |
  |                                                      |
  +------------------------------------------------------+

He'd have made a pretty good BOFH I think.

marshray3• 15 years ago

Q: Why would an application developer want to make limiting promises?

A: Because more users will trust the application and be willing to authorize it.

I think this is the only correct answer. Sadly, without mechanisms in place to limit the scope of the authorization, the market is aiming for a scenario where ordinary people simply don't trust web applications. Even visiting new sites on the web for them will carry a baseline of non-specific fear.

generalk2• 15 years ago

Most users will never analyze the "This application requests the following permissions..." screens; see: anyone that owns an Android phone.

abhaga• 15 years ago

Absolutely! It is not rare for me to get to the allow screen, notice that the app is basically requesting full access to my account which it clearly doesn't need, and leave.

As the worms spreading through e-mail show, social filtering may not be sufficient to identify rogue apps in time.

Janos• 15 years ago

We proposed a reputation mechanism for mash-ups/apps that can be plugged on OAuth. The service provider (e.g: Twitter or Facebook) records every access to the user account and sends a report after a week. Users rate the application which reputation is maintained by the service provider. Average ratings and comments are displayed when a new user is asked to grant an authorization.

Link to the paper: http://www.dundal.com/R2M-CCNC2010.pdf

tptacek4• 15 years ago

Both OS X and WinAPI do this now. Users (in general) hate it. You make a good point, but it's going to have little impact in the real world. People livin' in that 21st century do it better'n anybody you ever seen do it and they want their Kanye analysis now; they ain't got nothin' to lose! They rollin'!

I am deadly serious.

mikedouglas• 15 years ago

Users dislike it on Windows because requesting elevated privileges became so common that they rationally chose to tune out. Had Windows been designed from the start with UAC, developers would have been less cavalier in requiring administrator abilities, then maybe a UAC request might actually have meant something. Given that so many legacy games request privilege authorization, it's no wonder the users don't take it seriously.

Look at the mobile platforms for an example of implementing this idea correctly. Android users, the same who are likely to detest UAC, rave about the ability to see which parts of the system an application accesses before they install it. I'm an iPhone user, and I've always appreciated its piecemeal approach to authorizing location and notification services.

Zach's article is about making the message more meaningful, such that it's not just another automatic clickthrough. My guess is that users would much prefer this screen to what twitter is using now.

pvg• 15 years ago

There is a difference, though, OS X and Win apps ask for things that generally make no sense to a user, even if the app tried to explain them. 'I'd like to send tweets pretending to be you' is at least mildly meaningful unlike 'I'd like to BE you' which is the sort of permission desktop apps are stuck asking for.

masklinn• 15 years ago

> Both OS X and WinAPI do this now. Users (in general) hate it

Actually, I rarely see it popping up on OSX so I don't have much of an issue. Win7 on the other hand is downright dreadful: the whole screen flickers (not fades, mind you, you get the impression that the screen just shut down before you see the UAC window pop up) to black (and it manages to lag, which is terrifying), then your content reappears behind a lightbox and you end up with a small UAC window in a random position on one of your n screens (where n > 1 for me), unless somehow an other software has managed to steal focus and then all hell breaks lose (the program which started the UAC prompt will not respond, but I believe it does not focus UAC automatically, so you're left wondering why it's crashed).

And then it manages to not tell you anything useful about why you were prompted. And the window itself sucks: the details are mostly useless (they don't even tell you what the soft is trying to do), there are pointless effects (the zone where you have to enter your password becomes blueish if you hover, half the text of the window changes your mouse pointer to a hand even though they're not clickable, ...) and it pops up every time something tries to fart in Program Files.

OSX at least has the decency to let you drop softs in /Applications without bothering you.

patio11• 15 years ago

Users have been well trained that all install dialogs are just barriers to task success. They don't read anything on them. Next next next next Finish.

I guarantee you I'd get 80% conversion to "Format C:/ and pillage your Googles" if it were the last step of the BCC instller.

simias• 15 years ago

How do you enforce they tell the truth, and the whole truth?

deno4• 15 years ago

openid-abuse@twitter.com or web interface equivalent.

But even better, the requested capabilities should be specific enough, so that any additional description wouldn't be necessary.

rst• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, a malicious app isn't likely to really say "we want to spam your friends"; it'll make up some other excuse. And, as tptacek keeps saying, only a vanishingly small fraction of users pay attention to this stuff anyway, at least until they get burned.

So, if there's something to be done here, it may be in helping them to recover after they get burned --- perhaps an easy and straightforward UI for revoking OAuth tokens once granted, if the user doesn't like what the app has done with them?

deno4• 15 years ago

I'm not sure how it works now, but the way Facebook dealt with this issue is to present IFrame with confirmation what you're posting on your wall. This of course makes using client side scripting mandatory but it—very efficiently—limits any SPAMing capabilities of a rouge application.

Also, developers could request dropping this limitation but they had to go through Facebook's verification system, part of which was confirming that the app itself presents message before publishing and will only do that on the immediate UI input.

vdm• 15 years ago

I agree. My sister (a Normal Person) asked me why her new Android phone does this, and now she thinks she should have got an iPhone.

albertsun• 15 years ago

I recently discovered that to use the @Anywhere javascript API you have to have your app request read and write access even if you don't want write access.

* http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/apps/new

tptacek4• 15 years ago

Meh. The problem with this is that every empirical study of actual users is going to demonstrate that they simply don't care. The primary control that OAuth dialogs like these express is "prevent malicious phishing apps from coercing users into inadvertantly opting in", and the dialog we have now is sufficient to that purpose.

For the tiny subset of users (I am one of them) to whom this issue matters, you can mitigate the problem by periodically culling your OAuth tokens through the Twitter interface.

imajes• 15 years ago

There's still a culture of too-much-access (we might need it in the future!!) that needs to be addressed here. Perhaps once we're all super used to these interstitials, then it'll become a no-brainer to come back to them and request info.

Personally, i think we should go even further; lets request sunset/timeout clauses on access. I'm willing to give the kanye analyzer two weeks access to my twitter account, but after that, i want my token rescinded.

tptacek4• 15 years ago

I agree, but I think that's an issue Twitter needs to take up with app developers; there's no dialog you can design that enables them to punt that concern to end-users.

baconner• 15 years ago

Absolutely right. LinkedIn is doing this. access for one day, one week, ... when granting permissions.

lacker• 15 years ago

Making Facebook apps, we ran into a tiny fraction of users who disabled some of the permissions that we asked for. It was simpler to just keep popping up the permission window until they accepted or left the app rather than code special cases for the tiny minority that cared about nonstandard permissions settings. This became pretty standard in Facebook apps, although it's a bad experience, because hardly any users actually care.

So, be careful what you wish for.

jacobolus• 15 years ago

> hardly any users actually care

I’d be careful before making assumptions like this. Many users may care but still value using an app enough to put up with giving up permissions they’d prefer not to. Other users might not have any idea what the permissions settings do or say. Still other users (for example, me) just avoid facebook apps altogether because they universally ask for distasteful levels of access.

tptacek4• 15 years ago

Schemes that avoid users like you may be good business, similar to the way that fine-grained low pricing invites pathological users.

BarkMore• 15 years ago

The article discusses how many applications request write access when they don't need it.

I think that the reverse problem is even worse. Many of the applications that I use (Posterous, Picplz, Instagram) only need write access, yet they always get read permission. I don't want these applications reading my direct messages. Unfortunately, Twitter does not provide a write only permission.

ianburrell• 15 years ago

A good example of this is Clickpass that Hacker News uses for logins. With Google, it asks for access to "Google Contacts". There is no explanation of why it needs access to Contacts or what it is going to do with it. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do anything nefarious. I have seen other sites using Google Accounts for sign in with requesting OAuth access.

apinter• 15 years ago

While I agree that there are problems with access granularity for Twitter, the author ignores the access models of the other providers. Facebook for one provides an extremely rich set of granular controls. The grant screen, is however 1 page, so maybe that is why he chooses not to analyze Facebook further.

I also believe that the author has some fundamental misconceptions about OAuth. OAuth is merely a standardized way of gaining access to proprietary APIs. There is nothing in the specification about what sort of level of permission an access token will provide the consuming site. The statement: "And KanyeAnalysis™ uses OAuth, which lets you use your Twitter credentials to sign in!" is misleading and makes OAuth sound much more like OpenId than it really is.

jdavid• 15 years ago

You are missing the point. Apps need to respect a User enough not to get banned from Twitter.

Twitter also in their TOS specify how not do do things. If you don't follow the TOS and expected behavior of the app, then you are going to get complaints, and twitter will shut down your app.

In general it's not good business to get shut down.

PaulHoule• 15 years ago

A capability that I'm looking at for working with Facebook Connect is gradually adding more privileges as a user has more experience with the site and gains more trust.

Overall this problem is worse with things that are more app than web site or that put up an authentication wall before you can see anything interesting.

jjj38• 15 years ago

Probably a coincidence, but this sounds a lot like a post written by @richardhenry in November last year, right down to the "41 of the 43 apps":

http://www.quora.com/Richard-Henry/Improving-Twitter-OAuth-W...

Richard now works at Twitter.

adamdecaf• 15 years ago

Why the hell does he have 43 connected apps? Is this the norm?

I have three: GoogleTV, Mobile, Iphone. (I used to have TweetDeck and a couple others, so 6 total.)

steveklabnik• 15 years ago

I've got 33.

AndrewO2• 15 years ago

I see a couple of responses saying users don't care about this and they'd never read a dialog box.

Honestly, if that's the case, what's the point of OAuth then? Why don't we just go back to handing over usernames & passwords and trusting some 3rd party to not do anything nasty? With everyone constantly complaining about Facebook privacy concerns and hijacked Twitter accounts, how can anyone pretend that conditioning people to allow the maximum set of permissions to a complete stranger is a good thing?

rmc• 15 years ago

OAuth has some advantages over storing passwords, firstly you're not giving your password away. Password reuse is very common, if you give one site your Facebook password, they probably have your email password.

It also easier to revoke access to just on app, previously you had to change your password and then update all the other apps

AndrewO2• 15 years ago

I admit there was some slight hyperbole there. Let's say it's one better than giving out your password because it cuts down on the password reuses issue and you can revoke.

If that's all that OAuth will ever get us, then it's a failure: either because the goals of the spec were infeasible or because developers weren't able to use it to its fullest (I lean toward the later).

OAuth is not about solving password reuse. It's about granting other clients rights to specific resources on your behalf. It's about telling a 3rd party app they can tweet once, and not read my direct messages; they can read my Gmail contacts, but not send; and so on...

I for one believe in the need for this. But the original poster is right: as long as developers request blanket permissions, I'm not going to use their apps. I may be in a small category, but I'll ask again: is this the kind of behavior we want to condition into users?

neutronicus• 15 years ago

Maybe give the user permission to revoke any permission from any application - so that if some application is spamming your followers, you can promptly force it to cease and desist.

lsblakk• 15 years ago

I've often backed out of installing an OAuth app because of the overwhelming amount of info it says it wants read/write access to. I'd like to be able to choose what to give the app and I'd be willing to accept less functionality in some cases if necessary. Giving an app all your data could become the equivalent of a 'Pro' account.

kierank• 15 years ago

Couldn't have found a more linkbait title if I tried.

seiji• 15 years ago

Yeah, but it works because a.) Zach follows through with the metaphor throughout the article and b.) it isn't slimy self promotion.

joshwa• 15 years ago

"43 Ways OAuth Will Murder Your Children"

staunch2• 15 years ago

OAuth is powerful and awesome because even when people hand over full control they can revoke that access at any time they want.

Previous to OAuth people would hand over their credentials to third party apps. That's what sucking looks like.

commanda• 15 years ago

Before, all you needed to do to revoke access to all those crazy 3rd parties you gave your password to was: change your password. Now, you need to figure out where to go to revoke permissions, figure out what 3rd party app you no longer want, and figure out exactly what permission (in Facebook's case, but not Twitter's). It's confusing even for technical people because it's nonstandard and different on every OAuth provider's site.

staunch2• 15 years ago

1) Unless the app was evil and changed your password for you.

2) Or unless you wanted to let some apps keep access to your account, but not others.

3) And if you can easily deal with remembering new passwords (most users can't).

trustfundbaby• 15 years ago

I don't think developers get that users simply don't care about this kind of stuff.

There's a reason Steve Krug titled his book on good UI design 'Don't make me think'. We should be trying to make things simpler (from the User's POV) not more complex.

swah• 15 years ago

I'm building a startup and I want to make things easier for my users.

Should I let them "sign up" with OAuth?

I read somewhere that doing that I don't "own" the users. What does that mean?

All I want is for folks to find their friends automatically, and not to force people to remember another password.

samstokes• 15 years ago

I agree with the OP's conclusion - permissions need to be finer-grained and authorisation prompts more informative. But with OAuth as it stands, those things are under the control of the API provider, and app developers have limited control.

If my app has a button to follow someone on Twitter, my app needs Twitter write permission, which also lets me tweet as you and read your DMs. All I want to do is follow someone, but Twitter doesn't offer finer-grained authorisation, so I have no choice but to pop up the dialog box asking for full write access.

Twitter's an extreme example, but not the only one. The Facebook API also has some unintuitive permissioning requirements (for example, you need more permissions to "like" a post than you do to comment on it). Unless the permission model makes sense to users, apps have a hard time communicating to users why they need the permissions they're requesting. Judofyr's suggestion above would help a lot with this problem, but it's still not something that can be blamed entirely on lazy app developers.

onomojo• 15 years ago

But where would the business incentive be for the app writers? If they can't spy on you for later extortion techniques, how will they make money?

apike• 15 years ago

Due to a long-standing bug in the Twitter API, you can not add write support to an app without deleting it entirely and re-creating the app in their system. It will let you change the flag for future users, but there is no way to request the additional privileges from a user if needed. As such, it unfortunately a "good idea" to always create your Twitter apps as read-write.

Reference: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=669

milfot• 15 years ago

The problem, as I see it, is over the top access requests to access elevated privileges and personal information is the norm. This is not a user problem.

There must be a way for :

1. third-party developers to use the api to access information for their app in a kind of handshake mode - without the ability to use that information externally - or to access elevated privileges in a kind of sandbox arrangement.

2. for the api developers to use their control of market places and warnings to make these low level access privileges the norm, rather than the exception.

Getting these two things in place would mean developers would have to make a case to you, the user, if they wanted to do something more powerful or dodgy with the api.

bound008• 15 years ago

Facebook does a decent job of this, with the exception that you don't get to have a line-item veto. Users deserve a line-item veto.

drm237• 15 years ago

Twitter is half of the problem here. Once you request read access and a user approves it, there is no way under the same application then go back and get write access. Ideally every app would start with read and then only upgrade to write when needed but Twitter won't allow it. There are multiple bugs in their api issue tracker and they don't seem to care. The only way to get around it is to have two applications, a read and a read-write which actually is more difficult and why bother working around Twitters short comings when most users don't care?

I know this wasn't only about Twitter, but this is an issue I've had myself and it's incredibly annoying.

liuhenry• 15 years ago

Facebook has made a lot of progress in app privileges. Under http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications, there is a categorical line-item veto - you can revoke access to certain things, such as wall posting, access posts in news feed, access my data at any time, check-ins, etc. It also specifically shows what information was accessed by an app, and when (Last Accessed: Basic Info, Likes, and Current City on January 25th).

LinkedIn has time-out on permissions. You can set a specific time setting or allow access until revoked.

There's no reason that Twitter can't do the same. The subset of users who care about specific privileges can go and revoke them, and the app can re-request permissions if needed.

bugsy• 15 years ago

I agree with the criticism. This OpenID stuff was promoted as single sign in. That is not what it is at all! You are forced to give write permission to every app out there before being allowed to sign in to their site to do trivial things, and then they start spamming your feed and harvesting your data. When you try to turn it off there is no off switch that can be found. It's insane.

It's the same level of intrusion as if you wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper and by sending your opinion on local parking fees, the newspaper is given access to your private mail, is allowed to set up cameras inside your house, and asserts that you agreed the newspaper's publisher can have sex with your daughter.

What the hell does any of that have to do with submitting an editorial letter?

What it has to do is this system ALLOWS them to invade your privacy, so they REQUIRE you to give up your privacy and allow them to invade it in order to do things like post comments or vote in polls that have nothing at all to do with any of what they demand they must have.

It's an abusive system that violates consumers.

stevefarnworth• 15 years ago

So because some apps abuse the system, we all have to suffer writing lots of extra code?

In one of my apps, I request read/write access and then allow the user to select whether they want to tweet on an interaction basis, not on a connection basis. It would provide an extra pain point if the user did want to the application to tweet to have to go back to Twitter.com to change their settings (and if the setting can be changed via the API, then that defeats the purpose altogether).

It's not ideal when any app can spam, but it's better than having a user choose their access levels before they've even used the application (where the OAuth request dialogue tends to sit).

dalore• 15 years ago

I wish android did this.

yaix• 15 years ago

This is "double click SETUP.exe" all over again.

People don't read any message boxes' contents, they only see the "Ok" button and click it. It's amazing, but unfortunately true.

reqt• 15 years ago

Good point, bad example: your "KanyeAnalysis app" really does not need write access, so no need for checkboxes. It simply should not request write access, ever. Period.

danperron• 15 years ago

I agree, limiting third parties access to your data is why OAuth exists in the first place. Although everything in this article is about Twitter's implementation of OAuth and not OAuth in general. The title is misleading.

rckenned• 15 years ago

We had a similar problem at Yahoo! with BBAuth and OAuth. Developers started out initially building an application that needed access to (for instance) Yahoo! Mail. Unfortunately, there's no way in the Yahoo! Developer Network to "upsize" an application ID or consumer key after it has been created. You can't go back and say, "You know what? My application could be 2x as awesome if I added Yahoo! Address Book support." As a result, developers requested the kitchen sink: Yahoo! Mail, Address Book, Calendar, Flickr, Profile, MyBlogLog, Delicious, Fantasy Sports, Messenger, Updates and so on. In addition, each of those services has different permissions ranging from Read-Only to Read/Write (see https://developer.apps.yahoo.com/dashboard/createKey.html).

Google did a better job of this with their OAuth flow, allowing a "scope" to be passed in the authorization request so applications can dynamically select what they want access to (http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/auth/oauth.html#Scope). This means applications don't have to ask for the world up front when registering. Unfortunately it doesn't fix the "OAuth will murder your children" problem.

Ultimately it's a user experience problem. As the article points out, add too many checkboxes and it becomes too complex. The average user doesn't pay attention (like reading a EULA) and in several cases they're not going to understand the scopes presented to them anyway. Read/Write is pretty clear to most of us, not so clear to my mother.

As an amusing aside, I went to log into Hacker News using their Clickpass integration to sign in using my Yahoo! account. Clickpass does the OAuth song and dance and requests read/write access to my Address Book. "http://www.clickpass.com is asking you and Yahoo! for the ability to automatically sign-in as you to your Yahoo! account through a service or application that is provided by http://www.clickpass.com, and to read and store to your data in Yahoo! Address Book." Evidently OAuth will not only murder your children, it will wipe them from your Address Book, too.

lenary• 15 years ago

the "scope" parameter that google included is actully from the OAuth 2.0 spec (still in draft iirc). There are a lot of improvements in OAuth 2.0 which are worth checking out, but this is one of the main ones

brucehauman• 15 years ago

I agree. A simple solution in the meantime maybe to allow users to revoke certain access levels to specific services in an admin panel.

OAuth Will Murder Your Children

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