GetOpenIdConnect returns Invalid Credentials

Question

Context

We are successfully using https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth to acquire an authentication_code with the following app permissions.

• Know who you are on Google
• View your email address
• View your basic profile info

We are also successfully using https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token to exchange that authentication code for an access_token and id_token.

Problem

With that access_token, we are using https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/me/openIdConnect to acquire profile information. This is a GET request with the following header.

Authorization: Bearer access_token

The response from Google is invariably this error:

 "error": {
  "errors": [
   {
    "domain": "global",
    "reason": "authError",
    "message": "Invalid Credentials",
    "locationType": "header",
    "location": "Authorization"
   }
  ],
  "code": 401,
  "message": "Invalid Credentials"
 }

This Google documentation makes two suggestions:

• Refresh the access token using the long-lived refresh token.
• If this fails, direct the user through the OAuth flow, as described in Authorizing Your App with Google Drive.

We have tried both of those approaches and receive the same error.

Answer 1

We were accidentally using the id_token in the Authorization header. We needed to make sure to use the access_token instead.