Comment by rwmj

1 year ago

My main takeaway from this is that web authentication is still a horrible mess.

…because people don’t read the docs and instead just assume that it works how they think it should.

  • Have you seen the oauth docs? I can’t imagine anyone having read and understood them fully, unless you dedicate your life to it.

  • Half of it I think is because people take "basic auth" offered by web framework, and then try to retrofit OAuth/OIDC/SSO on top of it.

  • This is why login is a horrid mess. Because if it's too easy then people who don't know what they are doing set up websites.

When some people ask why most of us sane and practical folks still use and demand simple password authentication, it's because passwords fucking work.

  • I'm still firmly in the mutual TLS camp. Nothing is easier then never having to type in a password and good luck cracking TLS.

  • So much this. OAuth and their ilk are, in my opinion, not trustable and suffer from real usability issues.