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Forum Discussion
Proper way of handling APP KEY and APP SECRET
Hi there, as per the title, if my application is to be shipped to the customer, how am I supposed to properly handle the use of APP_KEY and APP_SECRET in the app itself for authentication?
Currently, it is encoded in a base64 string and stored within the application itself and included in the headers. However, the user can relatively easily retrieve it if they want and impersonate my app.
What would be the proper way of handling these information. Do I encrypt the base64 encoded string and store it in my app? Do I not include these in the app itself and find another way to obtain the APP_KEY and APP_SECRET?
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
The app key is considered public and does not need to be protected. The app secret should ideally be kept private though.
For server-side apps, such as web apps, this is possible since the app secret can be kept on the server only. In client-side apps, it's not possible to secure secrets unfortunately. Instead, you can avoid including the app secret entirely. For client-side apps, you can use the OAuth 2 "token" flow, which doesn't require the use of the app secret. You can find more information on that in the Dropbox OAuth 2 documentation.
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