Suddenly seeing new authentication failures between our application and Hubspot app

Developer Support APIs & Integrations
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1

We have an app that we use for customer integrations that we’ve been using for years. Suddenly we’re getting “Couldn’t complete the connection Authorization failed because the provided scopes are insufficient. Please contact the app developer.”

I’ve seen some posts about this error, but nothing has changed in our application or the Hubspot app and we’re unable to authenticate suddenly. Any ideas on what could have caused this and how we may be able to resolve? We have customers that are currently using the app and others that are unable to create new connections with the app. We don’t want to cause any harm to the existing customers that had previously connected.

2

Hi @BSisson4 :waving_hand:

Assuming the issues you’ve described have appeared without any changes being made to the app, my only thoughts are:

  1. Something related to the reasonably recent change to “required scopes” for Public Apps. See this article for more information.
  2. There was also this update, relating to Public App authentication credentials being automatically rotated by HubSpot if they were discovered to be exposed publicly. As fas as I can tell, this feature is still in Public Beta, so might be worth checking if you’ve opted into this beta program and then go from there if relevant.

If neither of those ideas turn out to be relevant, could you please share some screenshots of the issues you and your app users are experiencing? This additional context might help the community offer support here.

I hope this proves helpful. Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

3

Thank you for your reply Zach,

After some investigation and testing we determined that the problem was and at least a temporary solution. We were specifying a few scopes as required and a handful of other scopes as optional, in our code. The issue was that in the Oauth app we had only listed the few required scopes, but no optional scopes were defined. This was never an issue prior to the Hubspot changes, but seem to be required now. We set the optional scopes in the app and are no longer seeing the error.

One potential issue is that we also allow our customers to specify other scopes that they wish to use. So with this being the case we’d have to either enable a scope as optional on a case by case basis or enable most/all scopes as optional in the app. Please let me know if there are any recommendations here. Thanks