Posted by bundie 6 days ago
Its absolutely bonkers to me that web development has gotten to a point where this is a novel pitch. Up until not that long ago ALL auth was done directly in your own database and embeded in your own backend. Am I missing something?
Web devs use abstractions for lots of things. There's no reason auth should be a hill to die on.
Enterprise customers did the math on what a security breach lawsuit could cost and started demanding verifiably decent security, which meant some off-the-shelf off-premises solution.
That’s basically where we are now, and it’s the reason that most of Better Auth’s users are early-stage startups — they need to scale quickly, and they don’t have many pesky enterprise/governmental customers who might want to see a certification.
That's so 2001.
Bcrypt was in the default PHP libraries in 2013. It's been available in Python even longer.
This pattern of outsourcing the most basic of application responsibilities is lazy and exposes you to needless fragility and cost burdens.
There are a million and one libraries and frameworks that will handle all of this for you, meeting industry standards, without having to pay to be coupled at the hip to some SaaS vendor that will undoubtedly raise prices on you when they hit growth pains.
You're being rented a partial solution to something that has long been solved. And this - your customer relationship - is such a core function to your business that you shouldn't outsource it.
This is why we end up with businesses running services where a receptionist has access to customer passwords. Those who designed the system weren't even in a position to understand why that was a critical flaw in the design, let alone a problem that needed fixing.
Not really. What happened is that some service providers started offering managed services, some of them completely for free and snazzy UIs that became de-facto standards. Developers could onboard onto fully functioning auth services in minutes with barely any development work and no service to manage.
Why do you think Google's sign-in flows are ubiquitous?
These days I tend to favor having auth built-in, via an "old school" web framework that provides an extensible auth system out of the box. Then we’ll extend that system with a managed 3rd party service to handle SAML when that starts to come up in sales conversations, because the setup is annoying and we can lean on the vendor to deal with whatever weird old IdP the client shows up with.
I was 14 learning PHP in 2003 and every tutorial insisted you salt and use a more secure hashing algorithm.
It’s weird to see people say things so boldly that are so wrong.
if (md5($_POST['password'])) == password_col) // success!
better auth gives off the same shape. that gets well adopted because it survives scaling without needing a rewrite
same pattern and diff origin place. someone holding the whole stack in their head long enough to ship something
Not saying better-auth is strictly better, but at least you can read the docs and know what you're getting into yourself instead of 12 variations of the same thing
Oauth2, JWT's, hashes, timestamps, validations, and such, are all totally simple until they're not. The black hats have way more experience and way more time invested in this space than most any normal dev.
What I came out with was a far broader picture of what's been done in computing and, more importantly, how to find and read information about it. The biggest difference between me and my colleagues who haven't been to uni is when they run across something they haven't done before they are completely lost, whereas I'm usually able to say "hmm, that sounds like a graph problem, I think there's an algorithm for that".
Having said that, what I didn't come out with was how to do testing, version control, CI etc. Luckily that stuff is easy to learn on your first job.
It's mostly overrated, but not entirely so.
The vast majority of software development that I've learned has been outside of school, but there are a couple of core CS (and data science) concepts that I never would've learned if not for uni.
Anyway, the students grokking computer science are usually the better craftsmen, too.
Yes, a self-taught-dev should not write their own hashing-algorithms and so on, sure. But if Oauth2 is so complicated and hard to get right (and test), well then maybe the standard isn't so great.
Surely the black hats you refer to are themselves self-taught? They didn't find a school that would teach them about crime, right? In that case it seems like self-taught can be good enough.
They can spray and pray, you have to write proofs.
The difference between the bad guys and good guys isn't what they've learned. It's how the use what they've learned.
Any cybersec course worth its price tag is going to teach you all about penetration testing, exploits, etc. It's pretty hard to come up with a good defense if you don't learn about how the attacks work.
if software dev/blue team is wrong, it leaves a giant gaping hole in the system open for anyone to exploit 24/7
Rhetorical questions of course as we all know it's a clickbait title, but perhaps it would be nice for this label to stop being thrown around like it has any real consistent meaning or significance?
That being said, I didn't go to some fancy university -- just a small unheard-of state school of no notoriety. I think I benefited more from the learning environment and structure than from the actual instruction I received. Maybe I would have had better feeling about my degree had I attended a prestigious university, but honestly, most of what I learned was quite surface-level knowledge that came straight from the textbooks anyway.
I feel no superiority over those without a degree. In fact, quite the opposite. I feel a bit of shame that I do not know as much as I probably should despite having a degree.
Fundamentally, I agree with you. A piece of paper doesn't mean much. Based on the interview questions that are commonly asked, it seems like our industry doesn't find degrees that meaningful either.
But - and this is the funny part - I feel like my teen-angsty self has been vindicated. I'm so burnt out on exaggeration, not a single news site has gotten regular clicks from me in over a decade, nor do I comment or read comments. I listen to a little history dork YouTube before bed, or for tutorials. I'm free.
This sort of take is disingenuous. No one needs to go to a university to learn the syntax of a programming language, or to build up from a "Hello, world" program. That's not what a university is for.
That's not software engineering either.
In the very least an engineering exposes students to a curriculum which covers the necessary topics which allow someone to be competent at an engineering discipline.
Now, being a salesman and an engineer are two separate skills,so I don't really see a problem in having a "self-taught" programmer pitching a service and a business plan. However, as a prospective customer,having an auth service rolled out by people who clearly are not auth experts... That sounds like multiple downsides bundled with barely no upside.
Except that auth might not be a core part of your insurance or tax app, and you'd rather spend your energy on the part of "agility" that has to do with the core parts of your app.
I worked for a social media company before and we also rolled our own auth and we didn't regret it. High user accounts are a special case and you should know ahead of time.
But for B2B? Beware. You might get hit with an ask for active directory support.
Authorization is what's difficult and dangerous.
There are plethora of mistakes one can make in implementing AuthN/AuthZ, and many of them almost immediately will lead to either the direct leak of PII or can form the start of a chain of exploits.
Storing password hashes in an inappropriate manner -> BOOM, all your user's passwords are reversible and can be used on other websites
Not validating a nonce correctly -> BOOM, your user's auth tokens can be re-used/hijacked
Not validating a session timestamps correctly -> BOOM, your outdated tokens can be used to gain the users PII
BetterAuth is likely an improvement against the status quo for many companies if they have already decided to roll their own auth, as it at least already provides pre-made blocks of functionality that are hopefully battle-hardened rather than building completely from scratch.
If you’re just a developer who works on CRUD apps all day or never touches a backend then yea you probably don’t have the skills but auth is a solved problem and you can learn to do it right. A team of engineers can definitely put together an auth system.
[1] https://trust.okta.com/security-advisories/okta-ad-ldap-dele...
The problem isn't how you store the hash it's how you generate the hash.
Cryptography part is fine but storage or the auth process isn't.
You would like to think that no-one would write their app that way, but there are plenty of slightly less worse things that happen in practice and vibe coding probably introduces all sorts of new silliness.
Good enough for almost any startup in 2025.
OAuth, or any form of SSO, is not something you want to roll yourself.
Crypto is absolutely not something you want to roll yourself.
The issue is 99% don’t know them and are not very good at following them. And the cost of error is very high.
I’ve seen a lot of startups that failed to implement even google oauth securely.
So yeah it’s a far cry from fud and you really should not do it unless you are actually good.
I don't think this is a valid point. Specs only cover a single responsibility: interoperability. This is not a critical requirement of auth services, unless you have a hard requirement on federated auth.
I am not surprised anyone makes mistakes trying to integrate it anywhere.