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    <p>You want authorization: only some agents (mobile clients) and/or users should be allowed to access those APIs.</p> <p>To solve that problem, you need identification: a way for the server to tell who is who (or what), so the right decision can be made.</p> <p>There are many different way to provide some form of identification, depending how much you care about security.</p> <p>The simplest is a user agent string, specific to your mobile clients. But it can be faked easily. Slightly harder to fake are client based 'secrets' - embed some kind of secret or key in your mobile client code. You can make it really complicated and secret, but as ramsinb pointed out, you can't get security this way as it would require you to be able to guarantee that the secret you're shipping with the client (wether it's code, algorithm or any other fancy construct) can't be compromised or reverse engineered. Not happening when you don't control the client.</p> <p>From there, 3 choices:</p> <ol> <li>Security isn't really required, don't bother</li> <li>Security isn't really required, but you still want to limit access to your API to either legit users/agents or people ready to invest some time hacking your protection - go with a specific user agent or a client embedded secret - don't invest much into it as it won't block people who really want access to get it anyway</li> <li>Security IS required - and then I don't think there is a way around authentication, wether it's login/password, user specific (device specific?) keys, OpenID, etc... No matter what, you'll have to add to the user burden to some extent, although you can limit that burden by allowing authentication to persist (cookies, storage....)</li> </ol>
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