Google has beefed up the security of its cloud hosted services for developers by making several of them able to authenticate interactions with applications using certificate-based Service Accounts. These certificates offer a stronger authentication method than shared keys and passwords because they aren’t “human-readable or guessable” Google plans to add more APIs and client libraries to that list. The feature is implemented as an OAuth 2.0 flow and is compliant with draft of the OAuth specification, Google product manager Justin Smith said.”]