The value of a standard is that two parties who have never spoken can interoperate. The cost is that neither of them can fix the other's interpretation of it.
This piece walks through how we think about it at Paycux, what we have changed our minds about, and where the sharp edges are.
How social login maps onto React Router v7
How social login maps onto React Router v7 is where this gets concrete. Version the assumption, not just the code. Write down what you expect from the peer, and make the failure loud when it stops being true, because the alternative is a connection that half works for six weeks.
Version the assumption, not just the code. Write down what you expect from the peer, and make the failure loud when it stops being true, because the alternative is a connection that half works for six weeks.
The OAuth security details that React Router makes visible
The OAuth security details that React Router makes visible is where this gets concrete. Version the assumption, not just the code. Write down what you expect from the peer, and make the failure loud when it stops being true, because the alternative is a connection that half works for six weeks.
Version the assumption, not just the code. Write down what you expect from the peer, and make the failure loud when it stops being true, because the alternative is a connection that half works for six weeks.
- Validate signature, issuer, audience and expiry as four separate checks
- Normalize provider attributes into one internal shape
- Fail loudly when a peer stops meeting a documented assumption
- Keep a fixture per provider so regressions surface in CI
Building OAuth from scratch: Google as an example
That brings us to building oauth from scratch: google as an example. Normalization is the whole job. Two providers can be perfectly compliant and still disagree about what a group membership is, whether a logout is meaningful, and which attribute carries the email address.
Normalization is the whole job. Two providers can be perfectly compliant and still disagree about what a group membership is, whether a logout is meaningful, and which attribute carries the email address.
The sign-in route
The sign-in route deserves its own treatment. Treat anything the other side sends as untrusted input until it has been through validation you wrote. Signature checks, issuer checks, audience checks and expiry checks are four separate decisions, and skipping any one of them is a real vulnerability rather than a theoretical one.
Treat anything the other side sends as untrusted input until it has been through validation you wrote. Signature checks, issuer checks, audience checks and expiry checks are four separate decisions, and skipping any one of them is a real vulnerability rather than a theoretical one.
Version the assumption, not just the code.
The callback route
That brings us to the callback route. Treat anything the other side sends as untrusted input until it has been through validation you wrote. Signature checks, issuer checks, audience checks and expiry checks are four separate decisions, and skipping any one of them is a real vulnerability rather than a theoretical one.
Normalization is the whole job. Two providers can be perfectly compliant and still disagree about what a group membership is, whether a logout is meaningful, and which attribute carries the email address.
The sign-out action
The sign-out action is where this gets concrete. Version the assumption, not just the code. Write down what you expect from the peer, and make the failure loud when it stops being true, because the alternative is a connection that half works for six weeks.
Normalization is the whole job. Two providers can be perfectly compliant and still disagree about what a group membership is, whether a logout is meaningful, and which attribute carries the email address.
Adding GitHub
That brings us to adding github. Normalization is the whole job. Two providers can be perfectly compliant and still disagree about what a group membership is, whether a logout is meaningful, and which attribute carries the email address.
Version the assumption, not just the code. Write down what you expect from the peer, and make the failure loud when it stops being true, because the alternative is a connection that half works for six weeks.
Where this leaves us
The pattern repeats across every system we have looked at: the hard part is not the mechanism, it is keeping the mechanism honest as the surrounding assumptions change.
If you are working through the same problem and want to compare notes, the docs cover the mechanics and the console shows the behaviour on your own data.
Everything here, already built
Sign-in, enterprise SSO, directory provisioning, roles and an audit trail behind one API. Start with the quickstart and have a working sign-in this afternoon.