I asked for suggestions on r/node for alternatives to JWT and the first comment was "Just use JWT".
I knew of the existence of JWT so that’s what I ended up rolling with on my first true frontend heavy project. JWT token tutorials are an excellent example of my theory that “the internet doesn’t know shit, don’t trust it”. Case in point google “JWT ReactJS”. 8/10 tutorials are storing them in localstorage. At the time I knew literally nothing but I knew that was dumb as hell
Why? If you're worried about XSS, remember you're already toast in a million ways - including the ability to spoof a login/password form.
Heard good things about paseto[1]. It claims to be convenient as JWT minus the security issues entailed. Check it out, has some decent libraries for most main-stream languages. Didn't try it myself yet.
[1] hxxps://github.com/paragonie/paseto
It provides a hell of a lot of flexibility in terms of how you design your authentication architecture. For example it can let you use the same set of tokens for all your API's as you use for "web" traffic. It can reduce page latency. It can substantially reduce the footprint required for your auth backend.
It's pretty awesome. It is just mis-understood because people don't understand it. They assume that you have to invent some kind of "token revokation" system when people log out... nope. I assert unless you are a bank or something, 99% of your authenticated traffic is read-heavy and can tollerate 5 minutes worth of somebody getting ahold of a token that was used for a logged out session. All the write traffic and "sensitive" read traffic can just hit up the backend server to do real-time token validation.
For example here on HN 99% of authenticated requests are just to view this page, all this traffic doesn't need to insta-verify the auth token. The "post comment", "vote" and "change password" traffic makes up >1% of the traffic and can be "insta-verified" against the auth server. Who gives a shit if somebody impersonates that session for up to five minutes if they still can't comment or vote? The odds of it happening are minuscule and the damage isn't really bad...
You say that JWT is the right answer for most scenarios, I think that's not true. Aside from revoking, there's risk in complexity and I did my best in providing evidence that complexity causes real-world issues. You allude to this when you said "if done right", but that's a big if. I think this tends to fall deaf on some people's ears, because nobody feels that they might be the one to mess up JWT and inadvertently introduce vulnerabilities. Perhaps that is true for you, but the added complexity _is_ causing real-world security problems for actual developers.
The advantages I'm hearing is 'not blocking requests' and 'reduces latency' (which sounds like the same thing), but how much does this really matter? How much latency do you think this is? Has this really been a bottleneck for you?
You might well be part of the small group where every 5ms matters, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that that's true for "most scenarios". Most systems can bear an extra Redis fetch.
I'll concede it might just work better/simpler in your architecture, especially since you mention a dedicated auth backend, but shaving a few ms of a request is not a good enough universal reason given the drawbacks.
I fail to see how JWT is complex. It is actually quite simple--it's bog standard public key cryptography. Hell for most requests, even your damn load balancer can validate the auth token, your front-end servers might not even see the request for an expired token!
I would assert all these homegrown "just throw a redis instance at it" solutions are far more complex. Now you gotta deal with cache invalidation and that isn't fun. Plus it is a network request, and that takes a long time... time which I could spend doing something more useful for my customer.
The decision tree for JWT is easy:
- Is the token expired? Yes -- Return 403 (note: your load balancer can do this)
- Is it for a "sensitive request"? Yes? Verify token against auth server
- All other requests (99% of your traffic) - Validate the token locally.
Your comment that it's 'actually pretty easy' feels pretty reductive. If you're really making this argument, I feel it would be good to provide some evidence.
I've been doing this for a while, and in my experience a large group of devs would likely not be able to explain public key cryptography, despite having ownership over features and/or applications. This is not just about you and what you find easy, this is about the entire community with a huge variety of experience levels.
Adding redis or some crazy pub-sub crap to deal with logged out tokens.... that is truly making it far more complex. JWT is all about you deciding which pages truly need real-time "this token is invalid" and which don't.
Once you decide all requests need real-time you either are lying to yourself or JWT truly isn't the correct answer.
I think we are past an intellectually honest discussion. Disappointing. Good luck with everything.
So that implies that you already have a database setup and you are already using it in your app. That means there is zero extra operational or deployment complexity (compared to implementing a completely new and different bloated system.)
As for development complexity?
var isTokenValid = await redis.get(`k:${token}`);
if(isTokenValid != null) return next();
return res.status(401).send('Unauth.');I don't think you've thought about the problem space enough.
God grant me the self confidence of this fella.
I’ve been working as infosec engineer and been arguing with frontend engineers ( note its usually an individual) wanting to implement JWTs for years. Large companies with complex distributed systems, and the expertise to run them, however unless you’re doing some heavy API stuff or you’re Google scale it almost always is the wrong choice ( more often the request highlights an engineer who had almost exclusively been in the JS ecosystem and has very little backend experience).
Nobody has disputed that JWT reduces network latency. My argument is that JWTs are unnecessary complexity for your app, overused, potentially dangerous [0] and for 99% of use cases: probably unneeded.
Let me demonstrate my claims.
Average TTFB (Time to first byte) on mobile is 2.594 seconds [1]. TTFB is the duration from the HTTP request to the first byte received from the server.
> a few thousand miles
Sure. Worst case scenario, right?
I set up a MongoDB Cluster on Mongo Atlas. I selected the AWS Region 'eu-west-1', which is housed in Ireland. I am from America, so I estimate this physical distance at 3,500 miles. A true worst case for any web app. I plugged in some example tokens and then wrote an application that pulls down 1,000 random tokens.
My average latency was 113 MS.
So a "worst case" database connection scenario is only 4.3% of the TTFB.
Do you use a client side render framework allowing you to defer or asynchronously make database requests? Well, considering fully loading a webpage on mobile takes 27.3 seconds [1], that database request is now 0.41% of the time it takes to fully load that page. Less than 1 percent.
So the "best case" JWTs offer is the TTFB is reduced by 4% or full page load time is reduced by 0.4%. Is that a good thing? Yes, of course. Is it worth the trade offs? No.
Let me reiterate the tradeoffs that I personally see.
- Complexity in development, deployment and operations. (This is less of an issue if you started with JWTs.)
- Every single request your app makes is now larger, either slightly or significantly. (Larger requests also take more time, I'd wager that the 113 MS difference is much smaller when comparing a request with a JWT payload)
- Potential security issues ([0], [2])
- Unable to revoke tokens on demand (There are ways to achieve this, but you're literally implementing session tokens at that point...)
Your whole argument implies that TTFB is the most important metric. I can't imagine the first thing that startups do is spend time, money, and effort on trying to reduce their TTFB by 100 ms. Also, reiterating the literal article you are commenting on, "Statistically, most of us are building applications that won’t make a Raspberry Pi break a sweat." I can't dictate what individuals do with their own web apps but considering my web app does 1MS lookups to Mongo (not even redis), I can't see a situation in which JWTs are worth it.
JWTs are hype tech, and people love to ride that hype train. However, when we write code I believe we should be thoughtful as to how we write code. Before I start on a project or add a new module or even pick a database I look at the outcomes. What will this code do for my application? What will this code do for my users?
My users might have to deal with a few milliseconds of latency. Your users may have to worry about theft or loss of their personal data [0][2][3].
[0] event-stream survivor here. The most popular JWT module on NPM right now with 6.3 million weekly downloads has 15 dependencies from over a dozen contributors. Even if JWT is a secure standard in itself, that is a large attack vector.
[1] https://backlinko.com/page-speed-stats
[2] https://insomniasec.com/blog/auth0-jwt-validation-bypass
[3] You yourself said that "unless you are a bank or something [...] can tollerate 5 minutes worth of somebody getting ahold of a token that was used for a logged out session". 5 minutes of someone accessing an account they should not have access to is a unacceptable and huge security hole.
First pass, just do a database query! Most startups never hit the limits of this approach. It's hard to get simpler.
Second pass, cache the state in memcache. If you're on app engine or heroku or some other paas, you already have it available. Even fewer startups hit this limit.
Third pass, it's time to break out JWT. Congratulations, this is a great problem to have.
> You aren't blocking most of your requests waiting on your auth backend
Yeah, at Facebook scale. My database responds in less than 1 ms.
> for requests that actually need to have up-to-the-instant knowledge of a token's validity, you can always elect to hit up the auth backend anyway.
So... what is the point of JWT when I always need to know if a token is valid?
> For example it can let you use the same set of tokens for all your API's as you use for "web" traffic. It can reduce page latency.
Again, my database responds in MS. If you're doing client side rendering anyway, why not just throw in middleware to check the session token? You are trading literally 1 millisecond of latency for unneeded application complexity.
> I assert unless you are a bank or something, 99% of your authenticated traffic is read-heavy and can tollerate 5 minutes worth of somebody getting ahold of a token
Read heavy traffic does not imply that 5 minutes of stolen credentials is okay. Could my app survive if someone stole a token and used it for 5 minutes? Sure. Do I want that to happen? No. Without JWT, I can revoke tokens in milliseconds. I can revoke tokens if IP is changed. I can revoke tokens if user agent changes. I can revoke tokens if a user rotates their device.
> All the write traffic and "sensitive" read traffic can just hit up the backend server to do real-time token validation.
Again, what is the point of JWT if you still need to hit the backend? All read traffic is sensitive to my app.
> For example here on HN 99% of authenticated requests are just to view this page
Sure, then why use JWT at all? Keep the profile name and points in cookies, upvotes in local storage. Who gives a shit if the data is a little stale? Right?
JWT is unnecessary bloat in my opinion. At Facebook and Google scale I can see how saving billions of database calls a day could be useful. For people with less than a million page hits a day, probably not.