What is OAuth? And how it works

For longer than I care to go on the public record for, I thought OAuth stood for "one authorization." As in, you authorize a login once, and you're golden forever.  I was very wrong. But, in my defense, the vibes weren't entirely off. At its core, OAuth (short for Open Authorization) really is about making it easy to securely share access across apps—I just had the mechanism completely backward. It's not one key that opens everything. It's more like a system that makes sure every doo