Posted by colesantiago 6 days ago
Next.js is the new PHP, but worse, since unlike PHP you don't really know what's server side and what's client side anymore. It's all just commingled and handled magically.
https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/rss/aws-2...
Wasn't unheard of back in the day, that you leaked things via PHP templates, like serializing and adding the whole user object including private details in a Twig template or whatever, it just happened the other way around kind of. This was before "fat frontend, thin backend" was the prevalent architecture, many built their "frontends" from templates with just sprinkles of JavaScript back then.
But there are more people trying to secure this framework and the underlying tools than there would be on some obscure framework or something the average company built themselves.
Also "pay a real provider", what does that mean? Are you again implying that the average company should be responsible for _more_ of their own security in their hosting stack, not less?
Most companies have _zero_ security engineers.. Using a vertically-integrated hosting company like Vercel (or other similar companies, perhaps with different tech stacks - this opinion has nothing to do with Next or Node) is very likely their best and most secure option based on what they are able to invest in that area.
PHP was so simple and easy to understand that anyone with a text editor and some cheap shared hosting could pick it up, but also low level enough that almost nothing was magically done for you. The result was many inexperienced developers making really basic mistakes while implementing essential features that we now take for granted.
Frameworks like Next.js take the complete opposite approach, they are insanely complex but hide that complexity behind layers and layers of magic, actively discouraging developers from looking behind the curtain, and the result is that even experienced developers end up shooting themselves in the foot by using the magical incantations wrong.
What’s worse is vercel corrupted the react devs and convinced them that RSC was a good idea. It’s not like react was strictly in good hands at Facebook but at least the team there were good shepherds and trying to foster the ecosystem.
I see Vercel is hosted on AWS? Are they hosting every one on a single AWS account with no tenant isolating? Something this dumb could never happen on a real AWS account. Yes I know the internal controls that AWS has (former employee).
Anyone who is hosting a real business on Vercel should have known better.
I have used v0 to build a few admin sites. But I downloaded the artifacts, put in a Docker container and hosted everything in Lambda myself where I controlled the tenant isolation via separate AWS accounts, secrets in Secret Manager and tightly scoped IAM roles, etc.
It doesn’t make sense for a random employee who mistakenly uses a third party app to compromise all of its users it’s a poor security architecture.
It’s about as insecure as having one Apache Server serving multiple customer’s accounts. No one who is concerned about security should ever use Vercel.
You really have no clue what you’re talking about don’t you? Were you a sales guy at AWS or something?
However, to say that serving multiple customers with Apache is "insecure" is inaccurate. There are ways to run virtual hosts under different user IDs, providing isolation using more traditional Unix techniques.
Absolutely no serious company would run their web software on a shared Apache server with other tenants.
How did that shared hosting work out for Vercel?
I've read about the Vercel incident. Given the timeline (22 months?!), it sounds like they had other issues well beyond shared hosting.
Are you really defending Vercel as a hosting platform that anyone should take seriously?
Oh and I never download random npm packages to my computer. I build and run everything locally within Docker containers
It has absolutely nothing to do with “the modern state of web development”, it’s a piss poor security posture.
Again, I know how the big boys do this…
I’m not exactly surprised, but it seems like the unserious, ill-informed and lazy are taking over. There is absolutely zero reason why a large, essential public service should be overspending and running on an unnecessary managed service like vercel… yet, here we are.