3 ms·

And they've published updates[0] and libraries have hardened their defaults and removed support for insecure values (e.g. alg='none'). I'm not sure what more yo

• tptacek 4mo ago
  I don't recommend PASETO either.
  • doc_ick 4mo ago
    What do you recommend then? What technology has been designed, completed, then used for years without any updates or problems?
    • kasey_junk 4mo ago
      Bearer tokens are a dead end? You have to validate them anyway so traditional auth is the fallback.
    • tptacek 4mo ago
      https://fly.io/blog/api-tokens-a-tedious-survey/ https://fly.io/blog/api-tokens-a-tedious-survey/ tl;dr: most of the time you should use opaque random strings.
      • ForHackernews 4mo ago
        API tokens are a very small narrow part of the authorization universe. Having a shared secret relies on a trust relationship between the resource server and the identity provider that does not exist between, say, my SaaS backend and Google or Meta's login system.
        • unscaled 4mo ago
          The OP was talking about sessions (which include session cookies and API tokens). I'd argue these use cases are far more common for the average programmer than tokens and signatures that are used for federation, but I'll bite the bullet here: JWT is a serviceable solution for service trust and federation. This use case often just requires a very-short-term token, so lack of revocation support is not an issue. Replay attacks are still an issue, but they can also be prevented with single-use nonces that are included in the token claims. The OP's take (and my take as well) is that JWT is rarely the BEST solution for this use case. You kinda have to use it if you need to implement a standard that mandates JWT such as OpenID Connect. But OpenID Connect is a great example for a place where JWT was used, but was never really necessary. If you do use the authorization code flow securely (on the server side, with a strong client secret and proper CSRF protection) you don't need the ID token. In fact, you don't need to use any cryptography at all! Just like random session IDs, you've got a stateful solution that works reliably without any cryptography. If you cannot do a series of authenticated network requests between HTTPS endpoints to verify trust, then a signed payload could be useful, but you've got better standards than JWS/JWT for that. That's all.
          • ForHackernews 4mo ago
            > If you do use the authorization code flow securely (on the server side, with a strong client secret and proper CSRF protection) This restriction precludes all desktop clients, mobile clients, and webapp clients -- any place where you can't trust the client code to protect a secret. I don't exactly disagree with you: Security becomes much easier once you rule out handling all the hard edge cases.
            • unscaled 4mo ago
              PKCE, OAuth 2.0 for Native Apps and the Device Code flow are a thing. In practice all of these clients work so well with OAuth 2.0, that the implicit and resource owner password credential grants have been removed from OAuth 2.1 and are the latest OAuth 2.0 BCP forbids the password grant and strongly recommends against the implicit grant.
      • doc_ick 4mo ago
        That’s dodging the question, and a very generic and blank recommendation.
        • tptacek 4mo ago
          Seems like a very specific recommendation?
          • doc_ick 4mo ago
            I asked for a perfect tech in your eyes, that once created was never updated or improved upon. *edit: a recommendation for random strings in most cases isn’t perfect
            • tptacek 4mo ago
              In what way? Random strings are basically the gold standard. A lot of token cryptography actually destroys value already present in the random string.
              • doc_ick 4mo ago
                You keep arguing random strings are “basically” perfect for cryptography. I’d potentially read your research paper for strings if you cited it, but my main question is what technology do you think is perfect? I don’t want to hear about misplacing pseudo-random strings until I know your basis for a perfect technology that never improves from updates. Edit: also there have been how many attacks have there been on pseudo-random generators?
                • tptacek 4mo ago
                  There have been basically no practical attacks on the LRNG or on Windows CryptGenRandom and its subsequents over the last 20+ years. People have gone of out of their way to build userspace RNGs and blown their toes off, but getrandom/urandom have been rock solid. I think "don't use Mersenne Twister as your RNG" is a much safer bit of load-bearing advice than "use precisely these safe settings for your JWTs".