[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 :-)

[pvg]

Hah, yes it was a dumb joke more than anything else. I do want to tip my hat and encourage you to write more of these, they are materially useful as reference in places beyond message board threads and contrived 'worst client ever' quips.

[sytringy05]

I agree, this sort of discussion is invaluable. Thanks!