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by bpicolo 1979 days ago
Giving frontend clients the keys to the castle to send text messages and make calls on your app's behalf seems like a bad time waiting to happen. How are you thinking about the security aspect? I see the word "Security focused", but that doesn't really tell me anything.

Kinda the same deal on Stripe - if someone can guess / find out customer identifiers, which is a lot more likely when you're shipping them to frontends to use with your library (XSS...), they can create charges on your behalf? That's definitely a big risk fanout

1 comments

That's true, it doesn't make it obvious.

We handle security in a few ways;

- Clients are initialised with Key & ID - We advocate for keys to not be hardcoded

- The key is used for request encryption and are never sent to the server. Request hashes are also used to make sure Man In the Middle Attacks are avoided

- Custom Auth Tokens can be sent with requests - On the server side we use your provided auth callback to ensure it is valid

What do you think about the steps we take? Tokens are really important because they offer another layer of protection

> Clients are initialised with Key & ID - We advocate for keys to not be hardcoded

They're public facing (used by clients), so it doesn't really matter if they're hardcoded or not. I can rip them out of the dom/api calls/whatever.

For the second part, https covers you alone.

Auth tokens may start to pick at the puzzle, but at that point it's not obvious what I'm gaining if I have to bake custom authorization and authentication somewhere in any case?

You have a tough battle here - the security risk is huge. I don't personally see a value add yet, especially with Twilio/Stripe who have some of the lowest cost integration in the industry.

Not impossible to succeed in the arena, but the level of abstraction doesn't feel like the right fit yet

I see where you are coming from As it stands, it only solves a niche problem.

We want to help new startups, who are both looking to get their MVP build faster and are looking for no code/ low code options.

It will take time to build out a product for the larger community but for now we are looking to small a problem.

Thanks for your feedback