Show HN: Minimal NIST/OWASP-compliant auth implementation for Cloudflare Workers

Thank you for writing/publishing this. I especially appreciate the prominent warning at the top not to mistake it for a production library and to suggest an alternative. (It’s surprising to me how often people forget to add disclaimers like that to their code.)

Appreciate it, TheTaytay!

Oy.

Who specifically is this intended for? It's a wonder that the model didn't spice things up with some tangential compliance catnip like FIPS or PCI DSS.

I would be curious to see the prompts used to create this.

Recently, I don't think there could be a better example of applicability of Brandolini's law.

Everything you or your agent need to see is in the commit history.

I would love to see alternatives of educational code that implements these things in a "compliant" way.

Security does not come from Compliance (sometimes they are at odds) but as someone who is not an academically trained security professional but who has read NIST* in detail, implements such code and has passed a number of code reviews from security professionals. And who has been asked to do things like STRIDE risk assessment on products I write code for I do appreciate the references and links along side actual code of any kind.

Now to be fair, I have not yet looked at any of the code here, it's commit history or its level of AI-induced fantasy confidence in the validity of the specific solutions. That could be good or bad but the intent of this is really on point for me.

Edit: I looked at some code:

This is missing a lot from NIST SP 800-63B

Looking at https://github.com/vhscom/private-landing/blob/main/packages...

    - the db select runs before the password has so you can detect if the account exists with timing attacks
    - there is no enforced minimum nor maximum length on the stored secret (e..g para 5.1.1.1 and 5.1.1.2 recommend length range of 8 to 64 unicode printable chars normalized to some form i forget)

    - there is no enforced min max length on the account identifier (in this case email) and no normalization

At least not in the code i saw. so there is still a lot of basics/low hanging fruit from NIST recommendations at least you would find in any production grade auth framework missing

Hi, amichal. Nice finds. I will dig into more of the particulars where sensible. Please feel free to send up a pull request! Thanks for taking a peek.

Pretty sure all those are covered, upon more careful review. PRs open!

Edit: The create account I hadn't thought of for the email enum. Thanks!

Edit 2: Fixed up two schema issues identified and the last mitigated already via call: await passwords.rejectPasswordWithConstantTime(validatedData.password)

On the login... when failing either via user lookup, or password mismatch, I'll usually put a random 500-2500ms (or more) delay before logging and sending the response to handle timing attacks.

You can try a db transaction against a lock table for IP and Username as part of multi-request mitigation during any given request. CF offers Durable objects that can be used for this purpose. Return "too many requests" error if a request is sent before another is finished... this will slow things down.

On the minimum passphrase, there are some libraries you can use to get the printable character length... note: you should always normalize (NFC or NFKC) before doing any hashing or validation.

  function getPrintableLength(str) {
    // Use Intl.Segmenter for accurate, user-perceived character count
    const segmenter = new Intl.Segmenter("en-US", { granularity: "grapheme" });
    return [...segmenter.segment(str)].length;
  }

Personally, I usually just transparently set a max of 1024 bytes, I don't display a hint for it at runtime, only an error on submit though... if someone exceeds that, they deserve the generic error I return.

Email validation can be a bit rough, depending on how permissive or restricting you want to be. If you're willing to wait for a DNS/MX check on the domain, that's a good place to start. You most likely don't want less than 5 characters or more than 100.

Brandolini's law, aka the bullshit assymetry principle: it takes way more effort to refute bs than to create it.

FTR I'm not commenting on whether the posted project is bs, just clarifying the meaning of your last sentence.

> I wrote it

The commits feel more human than usual these days, as does the timeline.