Open Authorization (OAuth) is best described as which?

• A. Allows different websites to rely on a trusted third party to authenticate users.
• B. An open standard decentralized protocol for authentication users.
• C. A two-way relationship automatically created between parent and child domains within MS Active Directory.
• D. OpenID?

Answer: (A)

OAuth is an authorization framework that lets a user grant a third-party application limited access to their resources on a service without sharing their credentials. In practice, the user authenticates to a trusted authorization server and consents to the specific access the client requests (defined by scopes). The authorization server then issues an access token, which the client uses to access the resource server on the user’s behalf within those permissions. This arrangement lets multiple sites rely on a single trusted provider to manage access, rather than each site handling user passwords. Note that OAuth itself handles authorization; authentication is provided by mechanisms like OpenID Connect if identity verification is also required.