13 posts tagged with "identity provider"

In scenarios where security is offered as optional, there's an inherent risk. Customers, particularly those with a limited knowledge of digital security, might not fully comprehend its significance or choose to sidestep these features due to budget constraints. However, these seemingly inconsequential choices can expose users to significant risks. Without proper security measures in place, customers can become vulnerable to security breaches, putting their sensitive data at risk.

This situation raises a pressing question: how do we strike a balance in this landscape that is fair to both users and providers? Ensuring user convenience while maintaining robust security measures is complicated. If we lean too heavily towards convenience, we risk compromising on security. Conversely, an overemphasis on stringent security measures may lead to a complex and off-putting user experience.

Supply chains, whether for automotive parts or microprocessors, are complex, as we all know from recent history. Modern software, with more components than ever and automated package management, is also complex, and this complexity provides a rich environment for supply chain attacks. Supply chain attacks inject malicious code into an application via the building blocks of the application (for example, dependencies) in order to compromise the app in order to infect multiple users.

Even though JWTs (JSON Web Tokens, pronounced “jots”) have been around since 2010, it’s worth examining their more recent rise to become the dominant standard for managing authentication requests for application access.

When JWTs were first introduced, it was immediately clear that they were already an improvement on using a single string to represent the user information needed for authentication. The single string credential method was simple, but not as secure. There was no way to provide additional data or internal checks about the validity of the string or its issuer. With JWTs, there are expanded capabilities with more parts; there is a header, JSON-encoded payloads (called “claims”, which hold data about the user and about the token itself, such as an expiration date), and a signature (either a private key or a private/public key combination).

Let’s look a bit more closely at what a JWT is, review a short history of JWT evolutions and adoption, then discuss how JWTs are used in authentik.