What is a Facebook access token?

An access token is an opaque string that identifies a user, app, or Page and can be used by the app to make graph API calls. When someone connects with an app using Facebook Login and approves the request for permissions, the app obtains an access token that provides temporary, secure access to Facebook APIs.

Should I use access token or ID token?

You can pass an ID Token around different components of your client, and these components can use the ID Token to confirm that the user is authenticated and also to retrieve information about them. Access tokens, on the other hand, are not intended to carry information about the user.

How do I get my Facebook access token?

Obtain User Access Token

1. Go to Graph API Explorer.
2. In Facebook App, select an app used to obtain the access token.
3. In User or Page, select User Token.
4. Under Permissions, check ads_read .
5. Click Generate Access Token. The box on top of the button is populated with the access token.
6. Store that token for later use.

Is access token authentication or authorization?

The access token represents the authorization of a specific application to access specific parts of a user’s data. Access tokens do not have to be of any particular format, although there are different considerations for different options which will be discussed later in this chapter.

Do facebook access tokens expire?

When your app uses Facebook Login to authenticate someone, it receives a User access token. If your app uses one of the Facebook SDKs, this token lasts for about 60 days. However, the SDKs automatically refresh the token whenever the person uses your app, so the tokens expire 60 days after last use.

How do I check if my facebook access token is valid?

You can simply request https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx if you get an error, the token is invalid. If you get a JSON object with an id property then it is valid. Unfortunately this will only tell you if your token is valid, not if it came from your app.

Why you should always use access tokens to secure an API?

It enables you to authorize the Web App A to access your information from Web App B, without sharing your credentials. It was built with only authorization in mind and doesn’t include any authentication mechanisms (in other words, it doesn’t give the Authorization Server any way of verifying who the user is).

What should be in an access token?

In computer systems, an access token contains the security credentials for a login session and identifies the user, the user’s groups, the user’s privileges, and, in some cases, a particular application.

How does an access token work?

How Do Access Tokens Work?

1. Login: Use a known username and password to prove your identity.
2. Verification: The server authenticates the data and issues a token.
3. Storage: The token is sent to your browser for storage.
4. Communication: Each time you access something new on the server, your token is verified once more.

What is the difference between authentication and authorization?

Simply put, authentication is the process of verifying who someone is, whereas authorization is the process of verifying what specific applications, files, and data a user has access to.

Can I use OAuth for authentication?

OAuth is not authentication. It’s an authorization protocol, or, better yet, a delegation protocol. It’s for this reason that identity protocols such as OpenID Connect exist and legacy protocols such as SAML use extension grants to link authentication and delegation.

Why do I need a Facebook page access token?

Before your app can make calls to read, update, or post to Pages, you need to get a Page access token. With this token you can view Page settings, make updates to page information, and manage a Page. When interacting with Pages via the Graph API, you need to ask for permissions using Facebook Login.

What is a user access token?

A User access token requested by a person who can perform the action on the Page. For example, to moderate comments the person generating the token must be able to perform the MODERATE task the Page.

What happens when the user token expires on Facebook?

If your app doesn’t use the Facebook SDKs, you need to include code that refreshes the User token manually. If the User access token expires, your app must put the user through the login flow again.

How secure is Facebook’s OAuth2?

However, FB (and OAuth2) does require a secure connection between the client and FB. The access token is tied to the client public ID (usually hashed), which means only the original client application can use it to request the token because the secret is sent along with the authorization code to get the access token.