JWTs and OAuth suck for AI agents. Meet Wafers
positiveblue.substack.com
JWTs and OAuth suck for AI agents. Meet Wafers
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Re: JWTs and OAuth suck for AI agents. Meet Wafers
#2TLDR: JWTs say who you are. Wafers say who this request is on behalf of and exactly what it can do.
Re: JWTs and OAuth suck for AI agents. Meet Wafers
#3TLDR: JWTs say who you are. Wafers say who this request is on behalf of and exactly what it can do.
It looks very similar to Macaroons
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204314
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43499783
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233311
What are the differences?
Re: JWTs and OAuth suck for AI agents. Meet Wafers
#4TLDR: JWTs say who you are. Wafers say who this request is on behalf of and exactly what it can do.
It looks very similar to Macaroons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43499783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233311 What are the differences?
Wafers are definitely inspired by Macaroons, but the core difference is that delegation is tied to identity.
In Macaroons, anyone who holds the token can tack on caveats.
In Wafers, only the current holder can extend it, and they can explicitly name the next holder by public key.
That gives you a verifiable chain of custody instead of an unanchored blob.
Re: JWTs and OAuth suck for AI agents. Meet Wafers
#5really cool! the problem with new standards though is that it's hard to adopt. what's your plan to adoption? because nobody will understand it if it's not in terms of things they already use/understand.
curious if this can somehow slot into oauth too, or this is impossible? I've been thinking about oauth proxies that alter the oauth scopes into more fine-grained ones, working on this. maybe this is the key to adoption.
Re: JWTs and OAuth suck for AI agents. Meet Wafers
#6really cool! the problem with new standards though is that it's hard to adopt. what's your plan to adoption? because nobody will understand it if it's not in terms of things they already use/understand. curious if this can somehow slot into oauth too, or this is impossible? I've been thinking about oauth proxies that alter the oauth scopes into more fine-grained ones, working on this. maybe this is the key to adoptio…
Adoption is definitely the hardest "cryptographic" problem :D
You can think about this as a new auth token to add in your stack. It does not need to grow and take over the world overnight. We have seen how hard it is to change the status quo + how much it can adapt to new ideas (ex: SQL vs NoSQL)
For now I would imagine teams who need more flexibility in their auth stack to adopt this for new API