paseto

e goal isn't to displace JWT, though. The goal is to provide a secure-by-default, easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse alternative. After all, just because it's possible to implement a set of building blocks "securely" doesn't mean the kit is secure. I wrote more about this here: https://paragonie.com/blog/2019/10/against-agility-in-crypto... But even if you don't care about all of that, the upcoming PASETO versions (v3/v4) offer cryptographic properties that JWT does not, such as exclusive ownership. https://github.com/paragonie/paseto/blob/master/docs/Rationa... ------ Also, in case it wasn't obvious: PASERK is still a work-in-progress; things might change. Wait until you see a `1.0` tag before trying to implement it. There is a reference implementation in PHP, but that's also experimental and no stable release has occurred there yet.

eck the signature. What is the way around this? Looks like Paseto tokens (an alternative I've heard mentioned) works by not allowing unsigned tokens: https://github.com/paragonie/paseto Is there another way to fix this? > There are libraries that will see "none" in the algo field and treat that as "this token doesn't have a signature that needs to be validated, so it's good". Spooky! Can you share these so I can stay far away from them? :)

s JWTs for authentication' is presumably the common practice of avoiding steps 3 and 4: rather than having the second system initiate a session for the user, the JWT is treated as if it were a session token; rather than invalidating the JWT after its first use, it is accepted over and over again as part of the user's subsequent requests. This also requires the JWTs to have a longer expiry time than necessary, since they have to survive until the user's last interaction, rather than their first (in fact 'refresh tokens' can be used as well, but the principle is the same). As for why it's a bad idea, I recently came across PASETO (a simplified alternative to JWT) which specifically calls this out as an insecure practice due to the possibility of replay attacks ( e.g. https://github.com/paragonie/paseto/tree/master/docs#was-sta... )

and under very permissive licenses (MIT or ISC). Additionally, a great deal of time and effort went into the PASETO documentation, so that developers can understand not only how to implement it themselves, but also why it was designed the way it is. https://github.com/paragonie/paseto/tree/master/docs Given all of the above, is it really fair to write PASETO off as an attempt to sell services? Claiming that the original article is meant to sell services doesn't make sense either: If developers keep using unsafe tools, they will continue to be less secure and I'll have an easier time selling "make your products/services more secure" services to developers. The best thing to do, to meet such an incentive, is to say nothing publicly and let the easy money keep rolling in. So one of two things is happening: 1. You don't correctly understand our intentions. 2. We're really bad at understanding our own incentives, and it's a miracle we've been in business for 4 years.