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API Tokens: A Tedious Survey

Author Name Thomas Ptacek Twitter @tqbf We’re Fly.io. This post isn’t about Fly.io, but you have to hear about us anyways, because my blog, my rules. Our users ship us Docker containers and we transmute them into Firecracker microvms, which we host on our own hardware around the world. With a wo...

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Hasnain says:

A really great read on authentication and API tokens. I learnt a bunch here.

“I continue to believe that boring, trustworthy random tokens are underrated, and that people burn a lot of complexity chasing statelessness they can't achieve and won’t need, because token databases for most systems outside of Facebook aren’t hard to scale.

A couple months ago, I’d have said that Macaroons are underrated in a different way, the way Big Star’s “#1 Record” is. Now I think there's merely underrated like the first Sex Pistols show; everyone who read about them created their own token format. We’re moving forward with Macaroons, and I’m psyched about that, but I’d hesitate to recommend them for a typical CRUD application.

But, don’t use JWT.”

Posted on 2021-08-25T01:00:28+0000