php-jwt VS paseto-spec

So basically if the login is successfull I have to create a JWT token (with something like this library) with the userID inside and send it via `setcookie()` for web or in a JSON response to the API client and consider it the long lived refresh token.

This depends on the library you end up downloading for the platform of your choosing. Some of the parts I explained above will be handled by the library for example in my case I decoded signedTransactionInfo using firebase/php-jwt. This has the added benefit of always checking the validity of the signature which was omitted in the manual method.

https://github.com/firebase/php-jwt i use this one, its really good

> Why all the hate for JWTs?

> Just pick a crypto scheme and the JWT is just an encoding that makes it easier to use.

That's not what JWT is, but I can understand why someone would be misled into believing that.

JWT isn't just an encoding format, it also includes a crypto algorithm negotiation protocol that lets the attacker choose the algorithm. Even if you strictly allow-list which algorithm you want to support, you can accidentally bypass this control in many libraries if you suppor the `kid` (key ID) header. [1]

It also allows attackers to completely strip the security. [2] [3]

Put shortly, JWT is a gun aimed directly at your foot. That's why there's so much hate for JWTs.

[1] https://github.com/firebase/php-jwt/issues/351

[2] https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/03/jwt-json-web-tokens-is-ba...

[3] https://www.howmanydayssinceajwtalgnonevuln.com/

Another signcryption scheme as described in the article is also implemented by the libsodium author as an extension:

https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium-signcryption

It's unclear from the article if this is the same algorithm age uses.

Signcryption schemes are also a good candidate algorithm for replacing JWTs and PASETO as they suffer from no algorithm confusion, and don't need what PASETO calls "Algorithm Lucidity" and serve both plaintext authentication, authenticated encryption, sender receiver verification, and shared key generation that can be used for unlimited encrypted streaming, for example with libsodium's crypto_secretstream API.

https://doc.libsodium.org/secret-key_cryptography/secretstre...

https://github.com/paseto-standard/paseto-spec/blob/master/d...

The rationale for V3/V4 may be of particular interest for this forum.

Whether you're curious or skeptical, we believe in transparency, so the detailed rationale for these exact changes in V3/V4 is available here.