graphile / graphile/graphile.github.io

Security clarification: "wherever" is not a good place to store JWTs in the browser

Open
#188 1 comment 0 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @jkantr View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
SCSS
Stars
27
Forks
126
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

This note is more for myself - but feel free to engage in discussion if there's any necessary.

## Problem
The security page (https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/security/) has some general practices regarding JWT use. One in particular can be a huge security pitfall the way it's notated.

Within the code snippet under "Sending JWTs to the server":
```
// get the authentication token from wherever you store it
```
Although it's not necessarily in a browser context, i think it's pretty safe to say that is the general majority use of `apollo-client`. While it's well known that JWTs should never be stored in arbitrarily accessible locations (such as `localStorage` and `sessionStorage`, see: [owsap reasonings](https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/HTML5_Security_Cheat_Sheet.html#storage-apis)), unfortunately there are a lot of careless "tutorials" around from a number of years ago when JWT first became a hot topic that claim cookies are dead and shouldn't be used. It's gotten better, but even today a google search for "where to store authentication token" reveals a 3rd position result to SO with a selected "answer" that touts html5 storage (`localStorage`) as the superior option.

## Solution
While I think the discussion in https://github.com/graphile/postgraphile/issues/1049 is an important one, and there should be probably be a section just as large discussing cookie/session auth + maybe a note that the creator of `postgraphile` doesn't use JWT themselves.... for now I think it's important this specific comment gets replaced with either a note / link to a security-related source or a small subsection explaining the attack vectors - which is the scope of this issue.

I'll make a note when I actually take this on - but please just leave a comment if someone else wants to make this fix in the meantime so we don't duplicate work.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.