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ok_dadtoday at 3:41 AM2 repliesview on HN

Do you understand what OAuth is? It’s like an API key but less likely to be abused. This is a good thing. It helps security in many ways and makes security flows more safe than carrying around a token.


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sandeepkdtoday at 6:21 AM

I really feel sad about the state of security and its bit hard to unwrap in one paragraph which makes it more challenging. Let me try to be bit more verbose

Cloudflare API Keys - You create them and then use those keys directly against cloudflare API's to manage services/infrastructure in your account. How you create the keys is may be a different kind of challenge.

OAuth flow in discussion here - You are using a third party service (which registers themselves as a the client application with cloudflare), this service is going to prompt you for OAuth flow and redirect to Cloudflare, not (only) to authenticate you but it will get a access token on your behalf (your cloudflare account) from Cloudflare. Whatever this THIRD PARTY service uses this token for your behalf is going to incur infrastructure cost for your account.

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usr1106today at 5:05 AM

Maybe he doesn't. And I know that I don't (at least not in depth). And that's the frightening thing here. Using a protocol that many don't understand for access to valuable resources

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