Does Google OAuth2.0 support an OAuth-flow for a Resource Owner Password Credential Flow?

Question

Hello kind people of the internet.

Does Google OAuth2.0 support an OAuth-flow for a Resource Owner Password Credential Flow? ...and if so, then:

A.) can this type of OAuth flow be tested on the Google OAuth2 Playground?

B.) are there any examples of the "Resource Owner Password Credential Flow" with Google OAuth2.0 and the Google APIs?

Per an OAuth presentation recently in Oslo NDC 2013, this subject flow apparently skips the authorization end point all together and directly talks to the token end point of the OAuth2 server. The request syntax incantation would supposedly look something like this:

grant_type=password&
scope=resource&
user_name=owner&
password=password&

My understanding is the Resource Owner Password Credential Flow is for trusted applications in a back-end enterprise type of situations (where a name-password pair could be securely stored).

This particular OAuth flow would require no end-user consent interaction (no pop-up of a browser to Accept, then get a returned authorization-code, etc). In this subject flow the access & refresh token are directly returned, again: with no end-user interaction (albeit after an entry of a username-password).

Looking through the Google OAuth documentation ( link to Google OAuth2 docs ) there does not seem to be any mention of anything resembling Resource Password Credential Flow, but not sure that necessarily means it is explicitly not supported by Google.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

thanks in advance

Answer 1

Dear kind internet person,

it is true that Resource Owner Password Credential Flow is not supported on Google but google suggests you use the Installed Application Flow, which is described in: https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2InstalledApp.

You would need to create an Installed Application in the Google Console (https://code.google.com/apis/console), when you do that you can fetch the client_id and build a GET request with the parameters, which would look like so:

https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth\?
scope\=<scope>\&
redirect_uri\=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob\&
response_type\=code\&
client_id\=<client_id fetched from google console>

You would construct this URL and navigate to it on your browser, allow access for the app and google would give you what I believe is a code which you can use to get credentials. You can use those credentials to get an access token and refresh it, and this credentials is permanent. There's a good example of that on github. Note that you only need to get those credentials manually once, and then you save those credentials somewhere and keep using them to get/refresh tokens.

Hope this helps!