Why do OAuth packages in ASP.NET depend on Owin?

Question

There are multiple ways to secure a rest service like Basic authentication,API Key Authentication but OAuth is the most preferred ,I am new to Asp.Net and no nothing about Owin ,I have created a web Api project and now i want to secure it with OAuth 2.0 ,but all packages depend on Owin like Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth.Why do i actually need Owin to implement Oauth? Can't i simply implement OAuth in my project?

Sachin Singh · Answer

Thanks for reply @FarhanAhmed , i know Owin decouples Web App from host like IIS ,but suppose i do not want to decouple host and my web API ,i simply want to host my API on a web server like IIS but at the same time want to secure it with OAuth authorization protocol ,can't i achieve it simply. If not ,then what actually the Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth package contains, does it contain implementation of OAuth Authorization Server? Or, since Owin is a standard given by microsoft so we are bound to use this package to implement OAuth Authentication ?

Farhan Ahmed · Answer

OWIN allows web apps to be decoupled from web servers. It defines a standard way for middleware to be used in a pipeline to handle requests and associated responses. ASP.NET Core applications and middleware can interoperate with OWIN-based applications, servers, and middleware. https://medium.com/@uppilivasanthi/web-api-token-based-authentication-using-microsoft-owin-77ab0645f156 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/owin?view=aspnetcore-3.1 https://bitoftech.net/2014/06/01/token-based-authentication-asp-net-web-api-2-owin-asp-net-identity/comment-page-4/