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0 pointshdhzy8y ago0 comments

> - No built in mechanism to support key rotation (like JWT header kid). You'll need to roll your own.

That's not true. Macaroons have identifier field. See the Readme doc in libmacaroons [0]. Direct quote:

> The public portion tells us which secret we used to create the macaroon, but doesn't give anyone else a clue as to the contents of the secret.

[0]: https://github.com/rescrv/libmacaroons/blob/master/README

I'd say that the biggest difference between JWT and Macaroons is that Macaroons are on one hand simpler than JWT (only one algorithm allowed) and on the other a lot more flexible. Caveats are just byte arrays and it's up to the user to decide how to verify them. The official docs present simple case of string predicates (user = Alice) but it'd be also possible to use something similar to Bitcoin Script. Of course this flexibility has a price: if using third party caveats (another unique aspect of Macaroons) all services must use the same caveat language.

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unscaled8y ago

Interesting, I didn't realize that. The JWT ecosystem (or JOSE ecosystem to be exact) offers a lot of other machinery beyond just having a key ID for key rotation like JWK and OpenID Connect discovery, but there's nothing preventing you from using the same discovery mechanisms with Macaroons. I'm using these mechanisms already with a variety of other non-JWT implementations.

hdhzyOP8y ago

Oh yes, exactly, JWT has a stronger ecosystem. Sometimes I feel like they are aimed at different problems, JWT to replace opaque tokens with stateless ones (but if you want instant revocation it becomes a problem) and Macaroons for delegated access. JWTs can be easily used to replace session tokens while Macaroons work best when you've got your entire architecture designed with them in mind.

Just recently I was thinking that it would be nice if my DNS provider used Macaroons for API access. If I want to limit Let's Encrypt's client's access to just _acme-challenge.example.com I could take the Macaroon from DNS provider that has complete access and limit it to "_acme-challenge" and TXT records only. What is nice with Macaroons is that you can derive sub-tokens offline, just from the master token. Wrapping JWTs in JWTs, while possible, leaves one with the base64-in-base64 matrioshka problem.

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unscaled8y ago

hdhzyOP8y ago

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