4 comments

  • TheTaytay 12 hours ago
    Thank you for writing/publishing this. I especially appreciate the prominent warning at the top not to mistake it for a production library and to suggest an alternative. (It’s surprising to me how often people forget to add disclaimers like that to their code.)
    • vhsdev 12 hours ago
      Appreciate it, TheTaytay!
  • Terretta 6 hours ago
    > I wrote it

    The commits feel more human than usual these days, as does the timeline.

  • usefulposter 12 hours ago
    Oy.

    Who specifically is this intended for? It's a wonder that the model didn't spice things up with some tangential compliance catnip like FIPS or PCI DSS.

    I would be curious to see the prompts used to create this.

    Recently, I don't think there could be a better example of applicability of Brandolini's law.

    • amichal 11 hours ago
      I would love to see alternatives of educational code that implements these things in a "compliant" way.

      Security does not come from Compliance (sometimes they are at odds) but as someone who is not an academically trained security professional but who has read NIST* in detail, implements such code and has passed a number of code reviews from security professionals. And who has been asked to do things like STRIDE risk assessment on products I write code for I do appreciate the references and links along side actual code of any kind.

      Now to be fair, I have not yet looked at any of the code here, it's commit history or its level of AI-induced fantasy confidence in the validity of the specific solutions. That could be good or bad but the intent of this is really on point for me.

      Edit: I looked at some code:

      This is missing a lot from NIST SP 800-63B

      Looking at https://github.com/vhscom/private-landing/blob/main/packages...

          - the db select runs before the password has so you can detect if the account exists with timing attacks
          - there is no enforced minimum nor maximum length on the stored secret (e..g para 5.1.1.1 and 5.1.1.2 recommend length range of 8 to 64 unicode printable chars normalized to some form i forget)
      
          - there is no enforced min max length on the account identifier (in this case email) and no normalization
      
      At least not in the code i saw. so there is still a lot of basics/low hanging fruit from NIST recommendations at least you would find in any production grade auth framework missing
      • vhsdev 11 hours ago
        Hi, amichal. Nice finds. I will dig into more of the particulars where sensible. Please feel free to send up a pull request! Thanks for taking a peek.
        • tracker1 3 hours ago
          On the login... when failing either via user lookup, or password mismatch, I'll usually put a random 500-2500ms (or more) delay before logging and sending the response to handle timing attacks.

          You can try a db transaction against a lock table for IP and Username as part of multi-request mitigation during any given request. CF offers Durable objects that can be used for this purpose. Return "too many requests" error if a request is sent before another is finished... this will slow things down.

          On the minimum passphrase, there are some libraries you can use to get the printable character length... note: you should always normalize (NFC or NFKC) before doing any hashing or validation.

            function getPrintableLength(str) {
              // Use Intl.Segmenter for accurate, user-perceived character count
              const segmenter = new Intl.Segmenter("en-US", { granularity: "grapheme" });
              return [...segmenter.segment(str)].length;
            }
          
          Personally, I usually just transparently set a max of 1024 bytes, I don't display a hint for it at runtime, only an error on submit though... if someone exceeds that, they deserve the generic error I return.

          Email validation can be a bit rough, depending on how permissive or restricting you want to be. If you're willing to wait for a DNS/MX check on the domain, that's a good place to start. You most likely don't want less than 5 characters or more than 100.

        • vhsdev 11 hours ago
          Pretty sure all those are covered, upon more careful review. PRs open!

          Edit: The create account I hadn't thought of for the email enum. Thanks!

          Edit 2: Fixed up two schema issues identified and the last mitigated already via call: await passwords.rejectPasswordWithConstantTime(validatedData.password)

    • vhsdev 12 hours ago
      Everything you or your agent need to see is in the commit history.
    • chrisweekly 11 hours ago
      Brandolini's law, aka the bullshit assymetry principle: it takes way more effort to refute bs than to create it.

      FTR I'm not commenting on whether the posted project is bs, just clarifying the meaning of your last sentence.