A Study on Vulnerability Prevention Mechanism Due to Logout Problem Using OAuth

Abstract

Many web services which use OAuth Protocol offer users to log in using their personal profile information given by resource servers. This method reduces the inconvenience of the users to register for new membership. However, at the time a user finishes using OAuth client web service, even if he logs out of the client web service, the resource server remained in the login state may cause the problem of leaking personal information. In this paper, we propose a solution to mitigate the threat by providing an additional security behavior check: when a user requests to log out of the Web Client service, he or she can make decision whether or not to log out of the resource server via confirmation notification regarding the state of the resource server. By utilizing the proposed method, users who log in through the OAuth Protocol in the public PC environment like department stores, libraries, printing companies, etc. can prevent the leakage of personal information issues that may arise from forgetting to check the other OAuth related services. To verify our study, we implement a Client Web Service that uses OAuth 2.0 protocol and integrate it with our security behavior check. The result shows that with this additional function, users will have a better security when dealing with resource authorization in OAuth 2.0 implementation. Keywords: OAuth, Access Token, Identity Provider, Threat, Data Privacy