OktaDev
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2019–2026
1:02:17 · 2M views · Feb 5, 2018
Okta developer advocate Nate Barbettini explains OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in a roughly hour-long talk. It starts from the problems the protocols solve and walks through the flows. The description notes the implicit flow material is now out of date.
HN repeatedly points people to it as the clearest way to finally understand OAuth, to the point that one team made it required viewing for new hires.
7 comments from Hacker News
at my old company we worked with auth a lot, so it was a requirement for new joiners to watch this in their first week. i still recommend it if you want to learn oauth from 0 this video
I read so many docs when I was trying to implement OAuth and got more and more confused. This video was a huge help though for explaining all of the concepts: this video
This also has a very nice and simple explanation of the whole thing: this video It's about 1h long, but it's really worth it.
Seems there's still confusion so I'll copy/paste my old comment: OAuth 1.0/2.0 are a set of protocols and standards allowing applications to identify users and get access to their data using existing profiles. OAuth is mostly focused around authorization with claims (which are just key-value pairs) and authentication was an afterthought. OpenID is another standard designed to let people authenticate across the web, launched with a lot of hype in the early web 2.0 days but never took off. OpenID Connect (OIDC) is a new standard based on OAuth 2 + OpenID to provide both authentication and authorization in a single flow. OIDC/OAuth is all based on tokens, which are JWTs containing a bunch of claims that can be validated against the server that issued them. There are ID tokens (for the user info) and Access tokens (for accessing an API on behalf of that user), but some services like social logins don't provide any access tokens. Other providers might have rate limits, or dont have fine-grained permissions, or you maybe you have completely internal APIs that you need tokens for. Also this video is a great in-depth walkthrough: this video
I found Nate Barbettini's video on OAuth and OpenID Connect incredibly insightful for understanding these topics. He explains everything so well- this video . Additionally, I'm part of the ZITADEL team, an open-source project that's free to download or use in our cloud offering. So, you can always tinker around with it as some others have already suggested. Our blog dives into various security topics, ranging from OAuth, OpenID Connect, and Single Sign-On, Authentication, Federation to emerging issues like Passkeys. We also discuss real-world Identity Management problems and solutions seen by ZITADEL users— [LINK] . For any specific security-related queries, feel free to join the conversation on our Discord chat: [LINK] . We're always discussing and sharing insights on these topics.