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Comment by fathomdeez | Hacker News Reader

I also ran into this trying to upgrade my company's auth strategy. The hardest part of auth is convincing people that... it's not actually as hard or dangerous as they think it is. It was an uphill and ultimately unsuccessful battle of mine. People can't even divorce JWTs as simple, verifiable json data blobs from the entirety of the OAuth2 spec. You see it on HN, with hundreds of circular comment threads and I've seen it in real life.

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I would recommend that people don't do auth not because it's easy to be insecure, it's that auth sometimes needs agility. Auth sometimes needs to grow and adapt just like any other part of your product.

Except that auth might not be a core part of your insurance or tax app, and you'd rather spend your energy on the part of "agility" that has to do with the core parts of your app.

On the flip side I was at a startup using auth0, because as you said, not a core part of the business right? Until the traction hit and they had hundreds of thousands of users. Suddenly the auth bill became untenable - users are great but there wasn’t enough revenue to cover these costs. Auth0 didn’t budge. In fact they were outright nasty to deal with. They were holding our user logins and passwords hostage and they knew it.

You don't have to buy into Okta, you can also lean on auth frameworks like auth.js. Either way you're depending on outside labor to adapt.

I worked for a social media company before and we also rolled our own auth and we didn't regret it. High user accounts are a special case and you should know ahead of time.

But for B2B? Beware. You might get hit with an ask for active directory support.

Yes, people mix up the concepts of authentication and authorization (access control). Authentication can be really simple if you rely on a standard like JWT.

Authorization is what's difficult and dangerous.

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