Google Apps Introduces OAuth: Improved API Authentication Security

Joining a growing number of enterprise and consumer-facing Web services, Google has added support in Google Apps for the OAuth authorization profile, the company announced Monday. OAuth was chosen because it offers a more secure authentication option than the method already in place, noted Google software engineer Ankur Jain in a blog posting. Until now, administrators had to sign calls to Google Apps APIs (application programming interfaces) with their username and password, which is a security risk.

With OAuth, Google Apps can provide third-party applications with tokens that can be used to access the APIs of different Google apps, eliminating the need to supply log-in names and passwords for each API call. The APIs for Google Apps provisioning, e-mail migration, administration settings, calendar resources, e-mail settings and audit all now can interact with the OAuth signing mechanism.

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