Development/OAuth2

OAuth2 is a protocol that lets external applications request authentication of the user and authorization to perform actions using the web service on their behalf without getting their password. It is an alternative to HTTP Digest Access Authentication that MusicBrainz currently uses.

Basic steps

Registering an application

All developers need to register their application before getting started. A registered OAuth application is assigned a unique Client I and Client Secret. The OAuth protocol recognizes two types of applications:

1. Confidential - Applications that can keep secrets. Typically web applications, running on a server.
2. Public - Applications that have their code exposed to the public and therefore cannot keep secrets. There are typically installed desktop applications or web applications running in the browser.

Client Secret assigned to Confidential applications should not be shared. This does not apply to Public applications, in which case the assigned Client Secret is not treated as a secret and can be embedded in the application code.

Obtaining access token

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Using access token

After an application has obtained an access token, it may use the token in the web service to get user details or submit data to MusicBrainz on the user's behalf. There are two types of access tokens:

1. Bearer - Very easy to use, but can be used only over HTTPS.
2. MAC - Requires requests to be signed with a secret, but can be used over both HTTP and HTTPS.

Refreshing access token

Access tokens have a limited life-time. During the authorization process, application receives a refresh token, in addition to the first access token. This refresh token allows applications to obtain new access tokens.

Authorization

Authorization request

The authorization sequence starts by redirecting the user to the authorization endpoint with a set of query string parameters describing the authorization request. The endpoint is located at https://musicbrainz.org/oauth2/authorize and is only accessible over HTTPS. HTTP connections are refused.

The following set of query string parameters is supported by the MusicBrainz authentication endpoint:

response_type

Must be always set to code.

client_id

Client ID assigned to your application. You can find it on the website in your list of registered applications.

redirect_uri

URL where clients should be redirected after authorization. This must match exactly the URL you entered when registering your application. Desktop applications can use either urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob or http://localhost with a custom port.

scope

Space delimited list of scopes the application requests. See below for a list of all available scopes.

state

Any string the application wants passed back after authorization. For example, this can be a CSRF token from your application. This parameter is optional, but strongly recommended.

For example, a complete authorization request from a web application requesting permissions to read the user's private tags and ratings would look like this:

https://musicbrainz.org/oauth2/authorize?
  response_type=code&
  client_id=uTuPnUfMRQPx8HBnHf22eg&
  redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com.com%2Fauth2callback&
  scope=tag%20rating&
  state=1351449443

The response to the authorization request will be sent to the URL indicated in the redirect_uri parameter. The authorization endpoint will redirect the user to this URL with a set of specific query string parameters indicating the result. If the user does not approve the request or there is a problem with the request, it will return an error describing the problem. Otherwise it will return an authorization code that can be exchanged for an access token by the token endpoint.

In case of an error, the response will look like this:

http://www.example.com/oauth2callback?state=1351449443&error=access_denied

Possible error codes are unsupported_response_type, invalid_scope and access_denied. If there is a problem with the client_id or redirect_uri parameters, the authorization endpoint will not redirect back to your application and only inform the user about the problem.

A successful authorization response:

http://www.example.com/oauth2callback?state=1351449443&code=Nlaa7v15QHm9g8rUOmT3dQ

Scopes

Authorization requests have a limited scope. You should request only the scopes that your application necessarily needs. The following scopes are available in the MusicBrainz OAuth implementation:

profile

View the user's public profile information (username, age, country, homepage).

email

View the user's email.

tag

View and modify the user's private tags.

rating

View and modify the user's private ratings.

collection

View and modify the user's private collections.

submit_puid

Submit new PUIDs to the database.

submit_isrc

Submit new ISRCs to the database.

submit_barcode

Submit barcodes to the database.

Access token usage

The authorization endpoint can return two types of access tokens. The authentication process is different for each of them.

Bearer tokens

Bearer tokens are the default type of access tokens. They are very easy to use, consist only of one component, which you should treat as a password. For this reason, it is only possible to use them over HTTPS. If you try to send them over plain HTTP, they will be ignored.

The preferred method to use bearer tokens is via the Authorization header. An authenticated request would look like the following:

 GET /ws/2/user?name=xxx HTTP/1.1
 Host: musicbrainz.org
 Authorization: Bearer jr5xkCAg4hGcls9FXMVIuQ

If you can't use the Authorization header, there is an alternative in which you can pass the access token in the access_token query string parameter:

 GET https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/user?name=xxx&access_token=jr5xkCAg4hGcls9FXMVIuQ

You can try it with the curl command line application:

 curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer jr5xkCAg4hGcls9FXMVIuQ' https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/user?name=xxx

Or the query string parameter version:

 curl 'https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/user?name=xxx&access_token=jr5xkCAg4hGcls9FXMVIuQ'

Bearer tokens are specified in RFC 6750.

MAC tokens

The specification of MAC token usage is not yet complete, so this authentication method might change as the specification develops. MusicBrainz implementation is based on revision 01 of the specification draft and only supports HMAC-SHA1 signatures.

MAC tokens consist of a public access token and a secret key associated with the token. They require application developers to send signed requests and can be used over both HTTP and HTTPS, because the access token alone is not considered a secret.

First the application needs to get the current timestamp and a random string called nonce that should be unique for the timestamp. Let's assume we have timestamp 1336363200 and nonce dj83hs9s. We need to calculate a HMAC signature of the request, which is done from a normalized request string as defined by the MAC authentication specification.

 1336363200\n
 dj83hs9s\n
 GET\n
 /ws/2/user?name=xxx\n
 musicbrainz.org\n
 80\n
 \n

Using this string as a message and the secret key assigned from the token, we calculate a base64 encoded signature using HMAC-SHA1, which in this example is MY2RO3VylIdLgFXx8bIdyce/544= if the secret key was yi3qjrMf4hG9VVUxXMVIuQ.

An authenticated request with access token jr5xkCAg4hGcls9FXMVIuQ would then look like the following:

 GET /ws/2/user?name=xxx HTTP/1.1
 Host: musicbrainz.org
 Authorization: MAC id="jr5xkCAg4hGcls9FXMVIuQ" ts="1336363200" nonce="dj83hs9s" mac="MY2RO3VylIdLgFXx8bIdyce/544="

If you want to use use this authentication method, please refer to the specification for details or use an OAuth 2.0 client library that has it already implemenmted.