White paper

A key technical underpinning of the Cloud is the Application Programming Interface (API). APIs provide consistent methods for outside entities such as web services clients and desktop applications to interface with services in the Cloud. More and more, it will be through APIs that cloud data moves; however, the security and scalability of APIs are currently threatened by a problem called the password anti-pattern – the need for one API to collect and replay the password for a user at another API in order to access information on behalf of that user.

OAuth defeats the password anti-pattern, creating a consistent, flexible identity and policy architecture for web applications, web services, devices, and desktop clients attempting to communicate with Cloud APIs.