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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

> JSON Web Signatures are a gnarly format

They are??

As someone who wallows in ASN.1, Kerberos, and PKI, I don't find JWS so "gnarly". Even if you're open-coding a JSON Web Signature it will be easier than to open-code S/MIME, CMS, Kerberos, etc. Can you explain what is so gnarly about JWS?

Mind you, there are problems with JWT. Mainly that HTTP user-agents don't know how to fetch the darned things because there is not standard for how to find out how to fetch the darned things, when you should honor a request for them, etc.

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I'd take ASN.1/DER over JWS any day :) It's the weekend and I don't feel I have the energy to launch a full roast of JWS, but to give some flavour, I'll link

https://auth0.com/blog/critical-vulnerabilities-in-json-web-...

Implementations can be written securely, but it's too easy to make mistakes.

Yeah, there's worse stuff from the 90s around, but JOSE and ACME is newer than that - we could have done better!

Alas, it's not changing now.

I think ASN.1 has some warts, but I think a lot of the problems with DER are actually in creaky old tools. People seem way happier with Protobuf, for example: I think that's largely down to tooling.

The whole not validating the signatures thing is a problem, yes. That can happen with PKI certificates too, but those have been around longer and -perhaps because one needed an ASN.1 stack- only people with more experience wrote PKI stacks than we see in the case of JWS?

I think Protocol Buffers is a disaster. Its syntax is worse than ASN.1 because you're required to write in tags, and it is a TLV encoding very similar to DER so... why _why_ does PB exist? Don't tell me it's because there were no ASN.1 tools around -- there were no PB tools around either!

Don't you think you are falling for classic whataboutism here?

Just because ASN.1 and friends are exceptionally bad, it does not mean that Json Web * cannot be bad also.

> Don't you think you are falling for classic whataboutism here?

I do not. This sort of codec complexity can't be avoided. And ASN.1 is NOT "exceptionally bad" -- I rather like ASN.1. The point was not "wait till you see ASN.1", but "wait till you see Kerberos" because Kerberos requires a very large amount of client-side smarts -- too much really because it's got more than 30 years of cruft.

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