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Authentication Is Largely Solved. Authorization Isn't

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Re: Authentication Is Largely Solved. Authorization Isn't

#11
I would not move authorization into AWS unless you want to spend hours debugging YAML & JSON blobs & templates, struggle with verification, and worse yet, transfer application superuser work onto devs & admins. (Edit: also forgot about core feature lock-in that has to be redone if you switch clouds)

Having a user interface where trusted users can assign privileges to lower-level folks is massively advantageous if you build it right, by comparison. You do need to make fine-grained control possible, to be able to roll up permission sets into predefined roles, and - a simple matter that evades many - assign multiple roles to a given user. Users frequently "wear multiple hats", as they say, and you need to account for that.

Re: Authentication Is Largely Solved. Authorization Isn't

#12

If anyone has a good book on setting up a good authorization model in a corporate environment, please pass it along.

You just need a white list and a black list. Then conduct a background check to determine who is black and who's white. /s

Re: Authentication Is Largely Solved. Authorization Isn't

#13
“The most used passwords are love, sex, secret, and god” (Hackers, 1995)

Clearly the problem is solved now:

“Minimum of 6 characters please”

bullet ricochet noises

“Special character please”

ninja roll

“I’M GONNNA NEED TO SEE SOME ID”

nuclear explosion

Re: Authentication Is Largely Solved. Authorization Isn't

#14
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the king is currently SMS, which isn't good. I like passkeys, but somewhere between websites and browsers, even those aren't used in a consistent way. And idk why there are so many prompts before you're actually logged in with one. The name is also unclear. TOTP is way worse. It used to be kinda synonymous with Google Authenticator which had insane footguns for losing your codes. Now it's just inconsistent and w…

A very odd real example is how Sony went backwards with passkey compatibility on their apps. It's I think what happened when they tried to have a single OIDC setup instead of multiple (PSN was a totally separate setup for the longest time and had it solved, but other parts of Sony, on a separate system, was almost wholly incompatible. The merging of the two made it impossible for their current webkit implementations…

That's a more likely explanation for the Github passkey vs TOTP thing too.
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