If you check out the OAuth Core Abstract, Section 4 (http://oauth.net/
core/1.0#anchor4) states it pretty plainly:

"Service Providers SHOULD NOT rely on the Consumer Secret as a method
to verify the Consumer identity, unless the Consumer Secret is known
to be inaccessible to anyone other than the Consumer and the Service
Provider."

This is exactly what Twitter has done with the Consumer Secret; they
rely on it to verify the Consumer identity.

This is a thorny dilemma for open source developers.  There's no way
to share the source code without compromising your application's
security, because you've got to include the Consumer Key Secret in the
source.  You can obfuscate and encrypt, but a malicious actor with
access to the source code can simply "step through" the code until the
Consumer Secret is exposed in plain text.

In any event, what's done is done, and Twitter certainly isn't going
to abandon OAuth at this point.  But opening the source of my Twitter
client seems to be out of the question if I want to use OAuth.


On Jul 1, 8:10 am, Philip Plante <[email protected]> wrote:
> I do not feel you've made a mountain out of a mole hill here.  This
> topic has been on my mind since I first encountered oAuth.  I haven't
> seen any open source apps use oAuth yet.

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