> JSON Web Signatures are a gnarly format

They are??

As someone who wallows in ASN.1, Kerberos, and PKI, I don't find JWS so "gnarly". Even if you're open-coding a JSON Web Signature it will be easier than to open-code S/MIME, CMS, Kerberos, etc. Can you explain what is so gnarly about JWS?

Mind you, there are problems with JWT. Mainly that HTTP user-agents don't know how to fetch the darned things because there is not standard for how to find out how to fetch the darned things, when you should honor a request for them, etc.

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mcpherrinm 2 months ago | parent | next [-]

I'd take ASN.1/DER over JWS any day :) It's the weekend and I don't feel I have the energy to launch a full roast of JWS, but to give some flavour, I'll link

https://auth0.com/blog/critical-vulnerabilities-in-json-web-...

Implementations can be written securely, but it's too easy to make mistakes.

Yeah, there's worse stuff from the 90s around, but JOSE and ACME is newer than that - we could have done better!

Alas, it's not changing now.

I think ASN.1 has some warts, but I think a lot of the problems with DER are actually in creaky old tools. People seem way happier with Protobuf, for example: I think that's largely down to tooling.

	▲	cryptonector 2 months ago \| parent [-]
		The whole not validating the signatures thing is a problem, yes. That can happen with PKI certificates too, but those have been around longer and -perhaps because one needed an ASN.1 stack- only people with more experience wrote PKI stacks than we see in the case of JWS? I think Protocol Buffers is a disaster. Its syntax is worse than ASN.1 because you're required to write in tags, and it is a TLV encoding very similar to DER so... why _why_ does PB exist? Don't tell me it's because there were no ASN.1 tools around -- there were no PB tools around either!

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asimops 2 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Don't you think you are falling for classic whataboutism here?

Just because ASN.1 and friends are exceptionally bad, it does not mean that Json Web * cannot be bad also.

	▲	cryptonector 2 months ago \| parent [-]
		> Don't you think you are falling for classic whataboutism here? I do not. This sort of codec complexity can't be avoided. And ASN.1 is NOT "exceptionally bad" -- I rather like ASN.1. The point was not "wait till you see ASN.1", but "wait till you see Kerberos" because Kerberos requires a very large amount of client-side smarts -- too much really because it's got more than 30 years of cruft.