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Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

Ya ever heard of the OAuth2 protocol? I spent almost half a decade working on identity stuff, and spending a lot of time in OAuth land. OAuth is an overly complicated mess that has many many ways to go wrong and very few ways to go right.

If you told me the NSA/CIA had purposefully sabotaged the development of the OAuth2 protocol to make it so complex that no one can implement it securely it'd be the best explanation I've heard yet about why it is the monstrosity it is.

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> Ya ever heard of the OAuth2 protocol?

Have you ever seen SAML? Now there is a protocol that seems borderline sabotaged. CSRF tokens? Optional part of spec. Which part of the response is signed? Up to you with different implementations making different choices; but better verify the sig covers the relavent part of the doc. Can you change the signed part of spec in a way that alters the xml parse tree without it invalidating the signature? Of course you can!

Oauth2 is downright sane in comparison.

[To be clear, saml is not a ietf spec, it just solves a similar problem as oauth2]

Honestly, as someone who has implemented both SAML and OAuth2 (+ OIDC) providers, I found SAML much easier to understand. Yes, there are dangerous exploits around XML. Yes, the spec is HUGE. But practically speaking, people only implement a few parts of it, and those parts were, IMHO, easier to understand and reason about.

This is definitely an unpopular opinion however.

NSA?

What's insidious about SAML is that it really is mostly straightforward to understand, but it's built on a foundation of sand, bone dust, and ash; it works --- mostly, modulo footguns like audience restrictions --- if you assume XML signature validation is reliable. But XML signature validation is deeply cursed, and is so complicated that most fielded SAML implementations are wrapping libxmlsec, a gnarly C codebase nobody reads.

100% - XML vulnerabilities are the biggest issue. JWTs have also had their fair share, though I think they were mostly implementation bugs that have mostly been ironed out at this point. XML's complexity is inherent to the language.

> JWTs have also had their fair share, though I think they were mostly implementation bugs that have mostly been ironed out at this point.

The most famous JWT issue, to my mind, was people implementing JWT and -- as per spec -- accepting an encryption mode of "none" as valid.

That could be described as an "implementation bug", but it can also be described as "not an implementation bug" - all your JWT functionality is working the way it's supposed to work, it's just not doing the thing that you hoped it would do.

I did say "mostly." :) I almost mentioned this bug, but it's so famous, I doubt any mainstream OIDC libraries fall prey to it these days.

I'm a massive Aliens fan, and your word choice gave me a vivid picture of a vulnerability as a xenomorph egg leads to a swarm of nightmarish monsters invading the colony.

I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them ignoring CVEs for a percentage.

IMO this is a defect (sabotage? plain incompetence?) in the specs, full stop.

RFC 7519 (the JWT spec) delegates all signature / authentication validation to the JWS and JWE specs. (And says that an unholy mechanism shall be used to determine whether to follow the JWS validation algorithm or the JWE algorithm.)

JWS even discusses algorithm verification (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7515.html#section-10.6), but does not suggest, let alone require, the absolutely mindbendingly obvious way to do it: when you have a key used for verificaiton, the algorithm specification is part of the key. If I tell a library to verify that a given untrusted input is signed/authenticated by a key, the JWS design is:

    bool is_it_valid(string message, string key);  // where key is an HMAC secret or whatever

and this is wrong. You do it like this:

    bool is_it_valid(string message, VerificationKey key);

where VerificationKey is an algorithm and the key. If you say to verify with an HMAC-SHA256 key and the actual message was signed with none or with HMAC-SHA384 or anything else, it is invalid. If you have a database and you know your key bits but not what cryptosystem those bits belong to, your database is wrong.

The JWE spec is not obviously better. I wouldn't be utterly shocked if it could be attacked by sending a message to someone who intends to use, say, a specific Ed25519 public key, but setting the algorithm to RSA and treating the Ed25519 public key as a comically short RSA key.

> The most famous JWT issue, to my mind, was people implementing JWT and -- as per spec -- accepting an encryption mode of "none" as valid.

Sure that is pretty silly. However in saml you have xmlsec accepting the non standard extension where you can have it "signed" with hmac where the hmac key is specified inside the attacker controlled document. I would call that basically the same as alg=none, although at least its non-standard.

Redirecting the user when they tap sign in from untrustednewsite.com, to a new window with the domain hidden of bigsitewithallyourdata.com and saying “Yeah, give us your login credentials” always felt like the craziest thing to me

So ripe for man in the middle attacks. Even if you just did a straight modal and said “put your google credentials into these fields”, we’re training people that that’s totally fine

Like how Plaid for banking works.

OAuth2 is about the simplest thing you could come up to solve the delegated authentication problem. It's complexity stems mostly from the environment it operates in: it's an authentication protocol that must run on top of unmodified oblivious browsers.

There's a lot of random additional complexity floating around it, but that complexity tracks changes in how applications are deployed, to mobile applications and standalone front-end browser applications that can't hold "app secrets".

The whole system is very convoluted, I'm not saying you're wrong to observe that, but I'd argue that's because apps have a convoluted history. The initial idea of the OAuth2 code flow is pretty simple.

Sounds like you’re an NSA plant, Thomas :)

The problem is, as anyone with sufficient experience knows, it is perfectly possible and common for devs to design security disasters without any involvement by the spooks. I suspect the NSA counts on this and uses any covert influence they might have to slow corrections (eg. Profiles for OAuth2 that actually are reasonable, patches to common services, etc.)

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