[Donna]

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A mobile enthusiast and professional internet strategist got a glimpse of OAuth's dark side recently when he received an urgent advisory from Twitter.

The dispatch, generated when Terence Eden tried to log in, said his Twitter account may have been compromised and advised he change his password. After making sure the alert was legitimate, he complied. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. It turns out Eden used OAuth to seamlessly pass content between third-party websites and Twitter, and even after he had changed his Twitter password, OAuth continued to allow those websites access to his account.

"Unless you revoke these tokens when you change your password, a malicious user will still have access to your twitter account," said Eden, who tackles customer usability issues for a large telecommunications company. "Twitter doesn't make that wonderfully clear."

In theory, OAuth is supposed to enhance security by eliminating the need to share Twitter login credentials with other sites. The problem is that the tokens the service uses to authenticate users have to be manually reset.

http://www.theregist...auth_dark_side/