[Galene] Re: Help with JWT

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

>> I'm currently working on third-party authentication for Galene using JWTs
>> ("OAuth2" for those of you who like fancy enterprise acronyms),

> Better stick to "OpenID Connect" (short "OIC" or "OIDC") right from the
> beginning (see https://openid.net/developers/specs/). It's kind of
> a well-defined OAuth2 profile for user data.

Sorry, perhaps I should not have mentioned OAuth2.  I'm implementing
a simple and hopefully secure protocol based on JWT that will allow people
to write their own authentication servers in 100 lines of Python.  The
hope is that this will avoid the need to do e.g. LDAP integration in
Galene itself.

I am not interested in implementing hundreds of pages of beauracratic
rules unless they actually improve security.

> Then you should look into what you receive in an ID token:
> 
> https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#IDToken

This appears to mandate the use of OAuth2 client ids, which I'm not
implementing unless someone explains to me what actual attacks they
protect against.

>> 4. I'm planning to implement HS256 and ES256.  We good?

> Abstract from algorithms as much as possible, make it
> configurable. Support PKCE. Again, use a library.

Certainly not -- that's how you become the victim of downgrade attacks.

-- Juliusz