Google drive service account and "Unauthorized client or scope in request"

Question

I have 3 service accounts that are using the drive sdk.

1, works, 2 do not.

The error that comes back is "Error refreshing the OAuth2 token, message: '{ "error" : "unauthorized_client", "error_description" : "Unauthorized client or scope in request." }'"

All 3 accounts are registered in the developer console. All 3 are authorised for "Managed Client API access" within Google Apps Console. All 3 have the scope "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly". All 3 in drive, has a specific folder for it shared for "view only".

I am using PHP and I pass one parameter to the page which is called "type" and reflects what the purpose of the account is for, 1 for public, 1 for member and 1 for admin.

For example

http://www.somehost.com/oauth_client.php?type=googledrive_admin

The p12 certificate and user values are stored on the server. All "ini" files have the same structure of values, client_id, client_email, scope and query filter. In all cases the only item that changes between the files is the client_id and client_email.

My code is as follows:

    <?php

 include (__DIR__ . "/google-api-php-client/autoload.php");

 google_api_php_client_autoload("Google_Auth_AssertionCredentials");
 google_api_php_client_autoload("Google_Client");
 google_api_php_client_autoload("Google_Service_Drive");
 google_api_php_client_autoload("Google_Service_OAuth2");

 $type = $_GET['type'];
 $path = __DIR__ . "/secure/";
 $certificate = $path . $type . ".p12";
 $ini_path = $path . $type . ".ini";

 $ini = parse_ini_file($ini_path);
 $service_scope = $ini['scope'];
 $service_account_id = $ini['id'];
 $service_account_email = $ini['email'];
 $service_query = $ini['q'];

 $service_account_key = file_get_contents($certificate);
 $credentials = new Google_Auth_AssertionCredentials(
  $service_account_email,
  array($service_scope),
  $service_account_key
 );
 $credentials -> sub = $service_account_email;

 $google_client = new Google_Client();

 $google_client -> setAssertionCredentials($credentials);
 if ($google_client -> getAuth() -> isAccessTokenExpired()) {
  $google_client -> getAuth() -> refreshTokenWithAssertion(); **//FAILS HERE**
 }  

 $drive = new Google_Service_Drive($google_client);

 $result = array();
 $pageToken = NULL;

 do {
  try {
   $parameters = array();
   if ($pageToken) {
    $parameters['pageToken'] = $pageToken;
   }
   $parameters['q'] = $service_query;

   $files = $drive -> files -> listFiles($parameters);

   $result = array_merge($result, $files -> getItems());
   $pageToken = $files -> getNextPageToken();
  } catch (Exception $e) {
   print "An error occurred: " . $e -> getMessage();
   $pageToken = NULL;
  }
 } while ($pageToken);

 echo json_encode($result) . "\n";
?>

Each ini file is structured as follows

id="35{code}.apps.googleusercontent.com"
email="35{code}@developer.gserviceaccount.com"
scope="https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly"
q="mimeType != 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder'"

What I just cannot work out is why this works for one service account and not the others when I have gone through the same process for all of them. Any ideas and help appreciated.

Resolved by removing the line `$credentials -> sub = $service_account_email;` as there is no impersonation taking place and the account being used was not one from the domain — IMBRO, Dec 05 '14 at 00:30

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

Thanks for this post and your comment about "Resolved by removing the line $credentials -> sub = $service_account_email;"

I am facing a similar issue here. Apparently, $credentials -> sub = $service_account_email is only accepted for the first/primary service account created in the Google Developers Console. Besides that, it will also produce unexpected errors with certain OAuth2 scopes (as what I encountered with Fusion Tables).

Hence, here is the general advise:

DO NOT include $credentials -> sub = $service_account_email unnecessarily.

Only do this when you are trying to impersonating a difference user (with the condition that the appropriate setup has been correctly done in Google Apps Admin Console).

Even though it may not produce any error under certain cases, there are some unexpected behaviors when including an email address of the service account itself in the JWT claim set as the value of the "sub" field.

Google drive service account and "Unauthorized client or scope in request"

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