I also ran into this trying to upgrade my company's auth strategy. The hardest part of auth is convincing people that... it's not actually as hard or dangerous as they think it is. It was an uphill and ultimately unsuccessful battle of mine. People can't even divorce JWTs as simple, verifiable json data blobs from the entirety of the OAuth2 spec. You see it on HN, with hundreds of circular comment threads and I've seen it in real life.
I would recommend that people don't do auth not because it's easy to be insecure, it's that auth sometimes needs agility. Auth sometimes needs to grow and adapt just like any other part of your product.
Except that auth might not be a core part of your insurance or tax app, and you'd rather spend your energy on the part of "agility" that has to do with the core parts of your app.
On the flip side I was at a startup using auth0, because as you said, not a core part of the business right? Until the traction hit and they had hundreds of thousands of users. Suddenly the auth bill became untenable - users are great but there wasn’t enough revenue to cover these costs. Auth0 didn’t budge. In fact they were outright nasty to deal with. They were holding our user logins and passwords hostage and they knew it.
You don't have to buy into Okta, you can also lean on auth frameworks like auth.js. Either way you're depending on outside labor to adapt.
I worked for a social media company before and we also rolled our own auth and we didn't regret it. High user accounts are a special case and you should know ahead of time.
But for B2B? Beware. You might get hit with an ask for active directory support.
Yes, people mix up the concepts of authentication and authorization (access control).
Authentication can be really simple if you rely on a standard like JWT.
There are plethora of mistakes one can make in implementing AuthN/AuthZ, and many of them almost immediately will lead to either the direct leak of PII or can form the start of a chain of exploits.
Storing password hashes in an inappropriate manner -> BOOM, all your user's passwords are reversible and can be used on other websites
Not validating a nonce correctly -> BOOM, your user's auth tokens can be re-used/hijacked
Not validating a session timestamps correctly -> BOOM, your outdated tokens can be used to gain the users PII
I'm not criticizing BetterAuth here, but the idea that rolling your own auth is easy.
BetterAuth is likely an improvement against the status quo for many companies if they have already decided to roll their own auth, as it at least already provides pre-made blocks of functionality that are hopefully battle-hardened rather than building completely from scratch.
If you’re just a developer who works on CRUD apps all day or never touches a backend then yea you probably don’t have the skills but auth is a solved problem and you can learn to do it right. A team of engineers can definitely put together an auth system.
An improvement if their own approach would be worse than 'get a single self taught guy to roll something out'. If it's roughly the same it shouldn't be any improvement.
Counterexample: Storing the bcrypt hash by appending it to a CSV file containing the usernames and hashes of all users then having a login process where that CSV file is downloaded to the client and the password is verified locally against that CSV file using client-side JavaScript would probably be very bad.
Cryptography part is fine but storage or the auth process isn't.
You would like to think that no-one would write their app that way, but there are plenty of slightly less worse things that happen in practice and vibe coding probably introduces all sorts of new silliness.
I agree completely, which is why it's enlightening to read implementations of crypto. These are often short, seemingly simple, self contained sections of code that have to be as close as possible to perfect. Even simple things like constant time comparison algorithms are beautiful little crystal palaces of code.
> Yeah it’s not difficult if you know all the specs.
I don't think this is a valid point. Specs only cover a single responsibility: interoperability. This is not a critical requirement of auth services, unless you have a hard requirement on federated auth.
But given that BetterAuth is an open source project with a large following, and also given that they just got funding so they can hire more help, now we can evaluate BetterAuth's competency in terms of their ability to coordinate help.
