Enhancing OAuth services security by an authentication service with face recognition

Abstract

Controlling secure access to web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and web services has become more vital with advancement and use of the web technologies. The security of web services APIs is encountering critical issues in managing authenticated and authorized identities of users. Open Authorization (OAuth) is a secure protocol that allows the resource owner to grant permission to a third-party application in order to access the resource owner's protected resource on their behalf, without releasing their credentials. Most web APIs are still using the traditional authentication which is vulnerable to many attacks such as man-in-the middle attack. To reduce such vulnerability, we enhance the security of OAuth through the implementation of a biometric service. We introduce a face verification system based on Local Binary Patterns as an authentication service handled by the authorization server. The entire authentication process consists of three services: Image registration service, verification service, and access token service. The developed system is most useful in securing those services where a human identification is required.