7 Ways to Optimize OAuth Performance

OAuth is a nearly ubiquitous standard for modern APIs to enable secure authorization. However, to effectively deploy OAuth-based systems, you must consider how well they are optimized and the needs of the system. Below, we’ll explore some strategies for optimizing OAuth performance.

What is OAuth? A Refresher

OAuth 2.0 is an open authorization framework that allows for secure authorization across systems. This delegated authorization works without exposing the user’s credentials. Instead, the process uses tokens, which clients and servers can use to authorize access on behalf of the user. This enables seamless and lightweight deployments that are secure and easy to use.

The process involves the user granting consent through an authorization server, which then issues an access token to the client. This token is then used to access protected resources on a resource server.

Strategies For Optimizing OAuth Performance

While the OAuth system is relatively easy to use, it’s possible to implement the solution in a sub-optimal way. For that reason, adopting some general best practices can ensure optimized performance. With this in mind, let’s look at some methods that can help optimize OAuth performance.

1. Customizing for Scalability

Firstly, consider whether your OAuth implementation is built for scalability and performance optimization. Ensuring you’ve built an efficient system from the ground up will make other optimizations much more efficient and boost the system’s overall efficacy.

This can be done through a couple of different strategies. Chief amongst these will be ensuring that you have granular scopes. Granular scopes will prevent over-permissioning but can also help you start to plan what domains your OAuth setup will have. This will help when assigning and designing resource allocation, ensuring you know what servers must handle what.

You can further improve this effort by optimizing through single sign-on and federated OAuth systems, which will allow you to extend the initial OAuth implementation to cluster resources and systems together. This will allow for greater flexibility and design moving forward, ultimately resulting in a design optimized against future flows rather than the current needs and demands.

2. Deploying Multiple OAuth Servers

There’s an obvious answer to optimizing performance, but it’s a suboptimal solution — adding more resources. In some cases, your processes are only ever going to be so efficient, so adding more OAuth servers can go a long way toward solving the problem.

There are basically two approaches to take here. The first is horizontal scaling. Deploying multiple instances of OAuth servers in different domains and regions can reduce latency and balance the load, allowing for more optimal operations. Vertical scaling is adding additional resources to existing OAuth servers, increasing memory allocation or infrastructure. When paired with horizontal scaling, this might mean spinning up additional containers for OAuth servers while increasing the resources those servers can touch.

This is a suboptimal strategy because it doesn’t increase the optimization of the OAuth utilization itself as much as it simply gives more resources to the utilization to max out. In general, this doesn’t deliver a more optimal installation inasmuch as it simply hides the results of suboptimal design or implementation.

Also read: Top OAuth API Vulnerabilities 3. Token Management Optimization

To start optimizing the implementation itself, we can first look at tokens. How you manage tokens will impact the system’s overall usefulness, so starting here can pay off some huge benefits.

First, you can look towards the token lifespan. Using short-lived access tokens and utilizing refresh tokens to reduce the likelihood of abuse will minimize long-standing tokens while reducing the need to track this use. This, paired with stateless tokens such as JWTs, will remove the need for a database lookup on each API call, allowing more optimal usage of resources.

Strong revocation strategies will also help significantly in optimizing flows. Beyond ensuring higher security by voiding tokens that are no longer relevant, thereby reducing attack vectors, this also has the effect of ensuring ghost traffic is mitigated.

Many tokens that are automatically used to retrieve data might exist, even if that data is no longer needed or the process has been deprecated. By revoking those tokens, you ensure the onus for managing such shadow systems falls on the developers, not on you, to support.

4. Caching and Efficient Storage

Caching is another significantly beneficial thing to build into your OAuth system. By using caching systems to store frequently accessed data, both in terms of status data, such as retrieved information, as well as semi-static data, such as token validation information, you can reduce the load on your primary databases.

One good example of this is the phantom token approach. This method uses a by-reference and by-value token. In essence, a client is given a by-reference token in the request flow, and this token can then be used by a reverse proxy to locate a by-value token which can be substituted with the by-reference token in the actual requests to the service. In this instance, the token is being cached by the gateway and other middleware, abstracting the need for the API itself to do the caching.

While this will only be a small efficiency bump on each individual element, this will add up significantly over the entire system. By reducing pressure on the primary database through many smaller efficiencies in caching, you can make both more efficient use of your primary database for handling OAuth flows as well as reduce the overall pressure of the system, reducing the likelihood of tack-on effects in systems such as Kubernetes (OOMkill errors) or high latency.

5. Load Balancing

Load balancing is the process of distributing traffic evenly across server instances, and is a critical part of ensuring optimized performance. When considering the flow of data into a system, you must consider the totality of feeds coming into the overall process. As such, it’s often quite possible that the poor performance of an OAuth implementation is not because of inefficient systems, but instead inefficient balancing of those systems.

If a server is meant to handle 1,000 requests, and a collection of servers is facing 10,000 requests, that system can either fail through sending all requests to a single server or succeed by distributing them effectively. Ensuring proper load balancing and failover states will ensure that the load is distributed, making all systems perform more efficiently.

Also read: Strategies for Integrating OAuth With API Gateways

6. Reducing Request Latency

Another key area of efficiency is the reduction of total latency through reducing roundtrips within the system. The number of OAuth requests flowing through a system can be reduced by adopting certain methods, such as batching requests and reducing the total number of roundtrips by combining multiple API calls into a single request.

While batching API requests doesn’t directly reduce the necessary amount of OAuth observable events, it does reduce the total number of requests made. Additionally, OAuth servers can utilize multi-region hosting, which can significantly improve request latency by ensuring appropriate user service by region — that Asian users are not routed to North American servers, or vice versa.

For example, if you have a client routinely requesting the same data set or the same scope of data, it might make sense to batch those requests and serve them all at once. In this case, you can collect all OAuth requests, compare their tokens, filter those requests bearing the same token, and then feed them all as a single request. This can reduce the total amount of server touchpoints even if the same amount of data transfer is facilitated.

7. Rate Limiting and Throttling

OAuth servers are, ultimately, still just servers. Specialized as they might be, you can still optimize them with typical strategies around rate limiting and throttling. Ensuring that the service only fulfills reasonable requests can go a long way toward ensuring overall efficiency.

Adopting user-based rate limits can help make sure that abuse from individual users doesn’t overwhelm your OAuth server, which is important both for security and efficient use of memory and storage resources. Overall, this can result in a much more efficient and optimized system.

Similar systems for IP throttling can add to this effect, allowing you to protect your servers from denial of service and other flooding attacks while ensuring the overall system can reject inefficient and unoptimized requests. Overall, this has an additive effect, resulting in more secure and efficient systems.

Final Thoughts on Optimizing OAuth

By addressing these areas, OAuth implementations can scale effectively while maintaining the integrity and performance needed for massive throughput environments. OAuth can be highly optimized for various flows depending on your system’s needs. With the proper oversight and design mentality, this optimization can have huge benefits across the entire system.

When designing your OAuth implementations, ensure that you’re building for scalability. Deploy, cluster, and operate your OAuth servers with a mind for efficiency while anticipating future needs using approaches like caching and load balancing. Increase efficiency for end-to-end token flows between clients, APIs, and the OAuth server, and test this efficiency to detect areas where your approach is failing. Ensure that you work in regional considerations by providing geolocated resources — or, at the very least, locating the user’s flow as close to their region as possible.

These simple steps will dramatically increase your OAuth performance and pay dividends in various ways.