2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18353874
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16517412
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290114
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13865459
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929267
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11895440
>JWTs are useful, but there are a few things that are not immediately obvious. >1) They are signed not encrypted.
This is not true. JWT's can be encrypted, signed, or both (nested). One might first look to see if this misconception is the fault of a poorly written spec, but it's literally in the second sentence of the abstract and plain as day in the introduction. People are simply not reading it.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519
It drives me mad when people refer to JWT's as basically JWS's, ignoring the rest of the JWT standard and JOSE. The fact that these misconceptions continue to be up voted shows the broad misunderstanding of the standard.
EDIT: Case in point, all the disagreements and conflicting best practices throughout the threads on this topic.
Perhaps, but in practice there generally seems to be a correlation between complexity of a specification and holes in the specification (e.g., html, pdf, etc.).
That said, the class of attacks that relied on the attacker modifying the header of the JWT could have been totally avoided by including the header values in the signature calculation.