Sharing with Social Media

Does your application provide a way for users to share their progress or success with others through social media? Are you thinking about adding that feature in the future? Everyone loves to share their stories with their friends and colleagues, but as application developers we need to make sure that we are considering the security aspects of how we go about that.

Take-Aways

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• Use the APIs when talking to another service
• Don’t accept credentials to other systems out of your control
• Check with security to validate that your design is ok

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This morning, whether true or not (I have not registered for the RSA conference), there was lots of talk about the RSA registration page offering to post a message to your twitter account regarding you going to the RSA conference. Here is a story about it. The page asks for your twitter username and password to then post a message out on your twitter account. Unfortunately, that is the wrong way to request access to post to a social media account.

Unfortunately, even if you have the best intentions, this is going to come across in a negative way. People will start assuming you are storing that information, that you know have access to important peoples twitter accounts going forward. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, the problem there is that no one knows what happened with that information.

Just about every social media site out there has APIs available and support some oAuth or other authorization mechanism to perform this type of task. By using the proper channel, the user would be redirected to the social media site (Twitter in this instance) and after authenticating there, would provide authorization for the other site to post messages as the registered user.

Using this technique, the user doesn’t have to give the initial application their social media password, instead they get a token they can use to make the post. The token may have a limited lifetime, can be revoked, and doesn’t provide full access to the account. Most likely, the token would only allow access to post a message. It would not provide access to modify account settings or anything else.

If you are looking to integrate or share with social media sites, take the time to determine the right way to do it. This is really important when it involves access to someone else account. Protect the user and yourself. Don’t just take the easy way out and throw a form on the screen. Understand the architecture of the system and the security that needs to be in place. There are a lot of sites that allow sharing with social media, understand how they are doing it. When in doubt, run this by someone else to see if what you are planning on doing looks like the right way to do it.