WEweitendorf·Aug 2, 2025
I am pretty sure with the right tooling JWTs (or something similar) could be much easier to use and serve more needs/use cases than they tend to be used for today.
Even the very foundational libraries needed to create/sign/handle JWTs in many programming languages are kind of clunky. And I think subconsciously as developers when we encounter clunky (ie high accidental complexity) libraries/apis we sense that the overall project is kind of amateurish, or will take some trial and error to set up properly. Sometimes that's no big deal, but with auth you can't afford to risk your company or product on someone's side project.
For example, in Go, there is really only one major jwt implementation in use [0] and it's the side project of some guy with a day job working on protobufs [1,2]. Also, with all due respect to the contributors because it's
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a good library considering the level of support it has, it is just not easy to use or get started with.
Part of the problem is also that the JWT specification [3,4] is a bad mix of overly prescriptive and permissive regarding "claims". I actually think it needs to be replaced with something better because it's a serious problem: it adds a bunch of unnecessary fluff to deal with special claims like "email_verified" when that use case could easily just be treated like any other application-specific jwt payload data, AND it then adds a bunch of complexity because almost everything is optional.
Then of course there's the giant problem of handling your own private keys and identity/security infrastructure + all the associated risks. Nothing mature makes that easy, so everybody naturally prefers to delegate it to auth providers. But that tends to make it hard to fully leverage the underlying jwts (eg with custom claims) and might force you into an authorization model/impl that's less flexible than what JWTs actually support, because now you have to use your auth provider's apis.
I think there really needs to be some kind of all-in-one library or tool for developers to operate their own hmac/jwks/authn/authz safely with good enough defaults that typical use cases require ~no configuration. And maybe either a jwtv2 or second spec that strips out the junk from the jwt spec and prescribes basic conventions for authorization. That's actually the only realistic path to fully leveraging jwt for identity and authz, because you couldn't build something like that on top of auth providers' APIs since they're too restricted/disparate (plus the providers are incentivized to sneakily lock you in to their APIs and identity/authz).
Anyway, this is a project I've been toying with for about a year now and we have some funding/time at my company to start tackling it as an open source project. Hit me up if you're interested.
[0] https://github.com/golang-jwt/jwt
[1] https://github.com/golang-jwt
[2] https://mfridman.com/
[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7519#section-4.1
[4] https://www.iana.org/assignments/jwt/jwt.xhtml