I've been into web development for 4 years now. During my research regarding auth in this timeframe, I have found a million reasons on why I should not roll it myself. The reason is always it being to difficult to implement, too much responsibility and basically no matter how I'd do it, it would be unsafe.
The general consensus among web developers seems to be to just let a third party do it. And I understand the reasoning, they are experts and have decades of experience on that specific thing. It makes sense as long as you're fine with third party service dependencies for your application. However, I don't want that. I do not feel comfortable submitting my users data to tech giants for obvious reasons.
I am wondering why it's so difficult to implement secure auth? Why can frameworks like Laravel or Phoenix just generate auth solutions? Why should I trust them, if everyone is saying I shouldn't roll it myself?
After all, if Laravels or Phoenix generated auth isn't safe, I am the one taking responsibility anyway, no?
To my understanding web auth has been an issue for decades now, why aren't there protocols in place to solve it? Or if they are, why aren't they talked about a lot?
Considering how often I read about auth breaches with the big players in the game (Firebase as an example) I am not comfortable trusting third parties with that task either.
So how is one supposed to do it? There are so many JWT tutorials on youtube, but apparently JWTs aren't safe either. Then there are session cookies, which also aren't safe? Why is that?
I am also not talking about authorization. I specifically mean authentication. If I wanted a micro blog platform where users can log into their accounts and write about stuff, how would I make sure it's secure without having to trust third parties, especially big tech companies who repeatedly prove they cant be trusted over and over again?
arrowsmith•2mo ago
What makes you think they're not safe? Zillions of successful apps have been built using Laravel and Phoenix and (afaik) no-one has hacked their auth code yet. The code is open-source for anyone to inspect for vulnerabilities. I wouldn't feel unsafe using them.
You seem to misunderstand what it means to "roll your own auth".
"Don't roll your own auth" doesn't mean "use a third-party auth provider". It means "use an existing, expert-made auth solution and don't try to write it yourself."
That can be a third-party provider like Firebase, it can be a code dependency like Rails's Devise, it can be generated by `phx.gen.auth` in Phoenix, it doesn't matter - the point is that you're using a tried-and-tested auth solution written by someone who knows what they're doing.
Writing your own auth code is generally a bad idea because it's complicated, time-consuming and easy to get wrong. But there are zillions of off-the-shelf solutions you can use that have been created by security experts and battle-tested in thousands of production apps. As far as I'm concerned, web auth is a solved problem.
zwnow•2mo ago
arrowsmith•2mo ago
The Phoenix docs include a suggestion for how you can extend `phx.gen.auth` to add token-based authentication to your API: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/api_authentication.html
(No, this isn't "rolling your own auth" either, it's using someone else's pre-written auth code.)