Comment by kube-system
18 hours ago
> Almost no companies farm their security out to third parties.
They do it all the time, piecemeal, that's part of what anything-as-a-service delivers. If you don't want to secure an app, buy a SaaS one. Don't want to secure infrastructure?, buy an IaaS.
> Most places have combined them at some boundary, for ease of access, but there is no case in which an authenticated application endpoint (even /login) has to allow unauthenticated network access to it.
> And in all seriousness, name a service that is not a public website, but cannot use mTLS or IP allowlisting.
Literally any SaaS software where the customer does not or cannot practically install a certificate for you or provide a list of IPs in advance? mTLS is almost never used in a browser unless you are connecting to a government website with a pre-shared smartcard. IP whitelisting is great if the end users only work from behind a VPN or in an office. But there's a whole big world of people who cannot or will not do that.
And that is going to have to change.
There are already plenty of methods that are low-impact to users, like certificate-pinning in apps, and all you have to do to make it per-user is roll in their user-specific key JIT when they download the app.
Users will not be happy (just as no one is happy Reddit is going app-only), but they will do it, especially when it becomes common as companies decide they don't want to be the 5th breach notification on HN in a given day.
Today we have Bun, Cursor, Northflank, and now Linode!