[sytringy05]

Everybody is doing it (at least where I'm from). There's good framework/vendor support for OAuth 2 and JWT breaks the nexus between the services and the magic auth server that must be called on each and every request.

Even with the horrors of the implementation ({"alg": "none"}) It's a risk that many organisations are willing to take.

[pvg]

Right, but it sounds (if I'm understanding you right) like you're talking about JWT-and-things-as-a-way-for-your-services-to-talk-to-each-other-through-the-client. This is roughly analogous to Ruby cookies - save yourself a database read through the power of maths.

But tptacek seems to be saying 'I want you to understand all this S2S stuff before I can begin to rant at you about JWT'. That's a bit different and I'd like to get the rest of this newsletter.

[sytringy05]

No, I meant in the context of server to server comms, as well as end user authn/authz.

I would say that jwt is becoming the standard for s2s. I’ve personally worked with a dozen or so corporate APIs that use it and basically all the Microsoft Azure / 365 services are secured with jwt.

I’m intrigued by macaroon because as tptacek points out JWT is easy to get wrong, you’ve got to deserialize json before you can authenticate the request and it’s also tempting to stuff all manner of things into the token claims.

[pvg]

Huh, yeah that's interesting, thanks. I'm obviously way behind the state of the art in JWT-hating.

[lvh]

FWIW, this matches my experience. Large new enterprise systems have JWT all over the place.

My first pass counterargument to this is: great! You also have FAANG’s security budget and know how to find and resolve bugs like the FB OAuth2.0 tokens being replayable from 1 relying party to another, right? No? Oh.

The general subtext being: that’s nice but you know nothing of their rationale, underlying work that went into securing it, etc; so if you’re picking up a token metaformat without the massive work behind it, you’re just cargo culting.

[pvg]

Yep, that makes sense. I'm having a bit of a 'oh, so that's why' moment while also feeling a little envious of a subfield where 'the inadequate size of your budget' is a viable starting point for a constructive conversation with a client.

[lvh]

That's an argument from/with random people on the Internet, not clients. The nice thing about being around clients for a long time is that you build a working relationship with them based on mutual trust and respect.

That said, adequately informing clients of risk and dissuading them from nightmare projects they don't realize are nightmare projects yet is doing your clients a service. Sometimes that means advising them to avoid a feature. Sometimes it means implementing something slightly differently. Most of the time it's not even a trade-off. People use JWTs with just user ids in them, but not necessarily for any particular technical/philosophical reason that you have to address first :-)