Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

We added a security policy: https://github.com/stack-auth/stack/blob/dev/.github/SECURIT...

If it helps you, we delegate the most vulnerable parts of the application, such as OAuth, to lower-level frameworks — similar to the unmanaged auth libraries people use today. We are essentially a thick wrapper around those, to create a full-stack platform from primitives. (Of course, that doesn't mean the thick wrapper cannot be vulnerable, but it helps with some of the most hideous bugs.)

The point I disagree with is that building it yourself is better than delegating it to a third-party — at best, you can secure your auth against vulnerabilities you're aware of. Unfortunately, this fallacy keeps coming up, but generally it's the case that homebrew auth is not more secure than open-source libraries, nor is proprietary code.




Thanks for adding a security policy.

To be clear I'm certainly not suggesting people write their own auth from scratch. My point is more that even when using mature frameworks it's possible to miss necessary bits or accidentally cause vulnerabilities around the edges. My experience here is building auth on Django's built in auth system which is fantastic. The issue comes when you start customising session management (for real product use-cases!), without then understanding all the interactions between various flows. As we were using a framework in our application, fixing these sorts of issues was straightforward, however if we had used a third-party hosted application (even if running on our own infra), it would likely have been far harder to spot the issues and address them.


Understood. Thanks for clarifying :)




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: