What are the potential problems with exposing the Facebook API secret?
- by genehack
I'm writing a little web utility that posts status updates to Twitter and/or Facebook. That involved creating 'applications' with both those services in order to get API keys and 'secrets'.
My question is how protected I really need to keep those secrets -- in order for this to work at all, you seem to need the secret to interact with the authentication part of the service to grant the app access to your account and/or grant it permission to post updates on your behalf. Facebook's documentation says to protect the secret, but at least one other Facebook utility distributes the API key and secret in the source.
It's important to note: this isn't your standard Facebook 'application' that runs within the context of Facebook, nor is it a standard "desktop"-style compiled app -- it's a web-based application intended to be run on your own web server. The audience for this is probably small and somewhat more sophisticated than average -- so, one technical alternative would be to require people to obtain their own API key and secret to use the app. That seems like a lot of work, however, and a fairly large barrier to entry to anybody using this.
Anybody know or have any insight on what sort of trouble I'm letting myself in for if I put both the secrets and the API keys in the config for my app and check it into Github for all the world to see?
