Open Source Security Theater
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this is not what we're getting into yeah this is not podcast content chris cut this out you know what i mean
i need to really badly do a rant perfect do it that's what this is for that's what this podcast is i like was writing out a tweet and i was like like a really ranty tweet and i was like holding myself back so i was like i should probably just like rant about this on the on the podcast um let's go so we released open off beta uh last week or not last week damn it's only been it's not monday it's only been a week And it's been really cool. We've gotten like a lot of really great PRs, like a crazy amount of PR. Like every day I wake up to like five or six PRs that are definitely mergeable. And it's really great because that's kind of what we hoped for. Like we wanted to build a shell of something and the power of open source is to like cover the, like a long tail list of something.
And the community is actually doing that and helping us there, which is awesome. But I think it's general enough of a project that I'm getting like a much wider audience of people that are like looking at it. And so I'm attracting some of these like very annoying open source type situations. Uh, so it's not what people might imagine. It's not the person demanding a future. I actually don't care about that. Like I'm like, I'm, I don't find that annoying. Like someone, I know that annoys some people and they're like, you don't pay for this. But for us, it's like a little bit different. Uh, I get like, Man, I've been struggling. The reason I didn't post a tweet is because I'm struggling to find the right insult for this type of person. Like, it's like a Karen.
It's like a Karen category of person. But I feel like it's more specific than that. A couple of days ago, I got two issues open being like, do not use JWTs. They're insecure. And there's a second one that was like, do not use local storage. They're insecure. And this person just like linked a bunch of like random ass security articles. yeah and their view of things is so binary and whenever it comes to like i found this anytime you get in the category of like compliance or security or everything people are so proud to like know the know a rule they're so proud to know a rule you shouldn't do this and then whenever some situation comes up there's like blanket apply the rule uh the rule says you shouldn't do this
So he, you know, he wrote this thing about JWTs not being valid and they're like, you should never use them. But security is not like that. And compliance is also not like that. Anyone that actually works in these spaces knows that there's always a spectrum of insecure to extremely secure. And then you pick somewhere on that spectrum that balances the security aspect of what you're trying to do with, there's always a good product trade-off. Okay. Yeah. So he wrote this in like, as it was a binary thing and he, It's wrong because I want to kind of appeal to authority. Like every single, like a bunch of office of service companies uses the exact same model. And there is a very specific trade-off and very specific design you'd use to minimize the downsides of it, which is exactly what we did. We didn't factor that in at all, just linked a bunch of stuff.
So I said like- Is it expiration? Is that the key?
Yeah, so if you set, the problem with JWTs is the upside is you can verify JWT without calling another server. So it's really efficient. Like there's a bunch of good reasons for that. But that exact property, it makes it so someone can't revoke them. So if someone is like, oh, there's James who was leaked, I need to revoke it. Other systems are still going to keep validating it. They don't know that you flagged it as bad. And if you try to design some kind of system to make them check a database first, then you've effectively... lost all the benefits of a JWT. So what you do is you set the JWT expiration to be really low, like five minutes, and then you also issue a refresh token, and the refresh token is not a JWT.
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