this is an interesting idea -- what twitter could do is keep "key hierarchies" mapping a master consumer key to subsidiary consumer keys...?
On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Josh Roesslein <jroessl...@gmail.com>wrote: > I wonder if Twitter could provide developers with an URL for > dynamically generating additional consumer tokens for their > applications. When the user installs a new application it will contact > the developer's server to download its own consumer key/secret. The > developer's server will use its "master" consumer key/secret to post > to the Twitter URL to fetch a new consumer key/secret. The consumer > pair will then be sent to the application via a secure channel > (HTTPS?) to prevent man in the middle attacks. The application will > then use this new consumer pair to perform all signing of requests. > Another option is to package the dynamically generated consumer pair > in the application download package. Each new download will have its > own unique consumer pair ready for use once the user has downloaded > the application. > > This still requires the developer maintain a server to perform the > consumer pair generation, but it does keep the "master" pair secure > and each application gets its own pair. But applications that are > willing to make this trade off can keep the UX good, control what > application instances can authorize on the application's behalf, and > the "master" pair is never shared. You can always still distribute the > "master" pair with each application if these security gains are not > that important to you. Or you can require your users to generate their > own consumer pair if UX is not much of an issue (example: distributed > server applications) where an advance users is at the wheel and won't > have issues figuring this out. > > Josh > -- Raffi Krikorian Twitter Platform Team http://twitter.com/raffi
