Authentication explained

Google provides authentication and authorization API's for third party applications. These are services that are used to log on a user to his or hers Google account.

There are two main ways users can log on.
One way is to ask the users to provide their username and password. This is the worst way of doing authentication. The user has no way of knowing what happens with the username and password after they are given away.

The best method to log on is by using delegated authentication to Google itself. That is done by sending the user from this site to googles authentication service, along with a return address back here. The user authenticates with google and is then sent back here with a token that is used for identification when talking to google services during that session.

Another benefit of the delegated authentication is that google shows which services that the third party application needs to access in order to do it's work. This way users can be sure that no other google services is invoked on their accounts.

 

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