16 points by aaronpina 1 day ago | 3 comments
legulere 3 hours ago
Much simpler: just store session ids in Redis.

I skimmed over the previous articles in this blog and they don't seem to mention the one use case JWTs were made for: having a separate authentication server from the application server. Most developers will only need this for integrating into corporations with single sign in or social logins (sign in with Facebook/google/apple...). There you won't write the authentication server but integrate with them. Session Ids are dead simple to get right securely. Just use them.

hexagonsuns 2 hours ago
37 minutes ago
time4tea 5 hours ago
The key material is in redis? Seems odd. Should be in fips 140 hsm? Else key can be stolen easy.

Maybe missed something.

a_random_name 5 hours ago
(glanced at it so I could be wrong) They're talking about a public key that can be used to validate the JWT's authenticity. AFAIK there is no need to keep these secret, and it's not possible to (without breaking public key crypto) forge them so it should be safe to store them wherever.
time4tea 5 hours ago
From article:

Private key redis key

    public static string PrivateKey(string kid) => $"{Root}:jwks:private:{kid}"; // full private material (short life)
a_random_name 5 hours ago
TY, that seems like not the best practice.
nijave 5 hours ago
How can the key be stolen easily? That really depends on the security of the Redis setup. Redis is typically not internet accessible so you'd need some sort of server exploit.

Would have been good if the article example showed a Redis server with TLS and password auth.

time4tea 5 hours ago
Private key material should not be kept in the clear anywhere, ideally. This includes on your dev machine, serialised in a store, in the heap of your process, anywhere. Of course, it depends on your threat environment, but the article did mention pci-dss. If you put it in redis, then anyone that has access (internal baddies exist too!) can steal the key and sign something. Its hard to repudiate that.
flumpcakes 3 hours ago
How far do you go, how do you use the private key to sign something if you can't keep it anywhere?
bob1029 32 minutes ago
The most typical end-game is using a HSM-backed cloud product, generating the PK in the HSM (it never leaves), and making calls across the network to the key vault service for signing requests.

This is a hard tradeoff between availability and compliance. If the cloud service goes down or you have an internet issue, you would lose the ability to sign any new tokens. This is a fairly fundamental aspect of infrastructure so it's worth considering if you absolutely must put it across the wire.

JackSlateur 3 hours ago
TPM

You never have the private key, only the ability to ask something to encrypt/sign something