HACKER Q&A
📣 sardonico

Are you satisfied by your authentication system?


What do you use to authenticate your users? Are you happy? What would you change?


  👤 ecesena Accepted Answer ✓
I think authn will be the next big open source thing. In a similar way as how cryptography is now pretty much open (i.e. most people use open source libraries) and network protocols like TLS also are or are becoming. Authn, instead, is still very much closed, in the sense that the majority of the companies I know of have custom implementations.

If you think it from a more practical point of view, everybody who starts a project has to build authn, which is globally highly inefficient.

But unfortunately there are a lot of preconceptions to overcome... we'll see, I'm hopeful. Sorry I kind of derailed.

What I didn't like before: closed/custom implementation, every new method is extra work and can break things, hard to handle teams/multi-user accounts, generally distracts people from core features. What I liked was the care for the UX/UI.

What I'm building now. Team first (invite users, enterprise sso), native integration w/ payments (so you don't need payment logic into your core app) and of course open source. If we want to go one level deeper: first party auth (no 3p domains), based on secure cookies, use of JWT so you can delegate auth to microservices.


👤 mathnode
No.