2 posts tagged with "history"

Supply chains, whether for automotive parts or microprocessors, are complex, as we all know from recent history. Modern software, with more components than ever and automated package management, is also complex, and this complexity provides a rich environment for supply chain attacks. Supply chain attacks inject malicious code into an application via the building blocks of the application (for example, dependencies) in order to compromise the app in order to infect multiple users.

Even though JWTs (JSON Web Tokens, pronounced “jots”) have been around since 2010, it’s worth examining their more recent rise to become the dominant standard for managing authentication requests for application access.

When JWTs were first introduced, it was immediately clear that they were already an improvement on using a single string to represent the user information needed for authentication. The single string credential method was simple, but not as secure. There was no way to provide additional data or internal checks about the validity of the string or its issuer. With JWTs, there are expanded capabilities with more parts; there is a header, JSON-encoded payloads (called “claims”, which hold data about the user and about the token itself, such as an expiration date), and a signature (either a private key or a private/public key combination).

Let’s look a bit more closely at what a JWT is, review a short history of JWT evolutions and adoption, then discuss how JWTs are used in authentik.