Show HN: Minimal NIST/OWASP-compliant auth implementation for Cloudflare Workers

Show HN: Minimal NIST/OWASP-compliant auth implementation for Cloudflare Workers(github.com)

33 points by vhsdev 144 days ago | 10 comments

This is an educational reference implementation showing how to build reasonably secure, standards-compliant authentication from first principles on Cloudflare Workers.

Stack: Hono, Turso (libSQL), PBKDF2-SHA384 + normalization + common-password checks, JWT access + refresh tokens with revocation support, HTTP-only SameSite cookies, device tracking.

It's deliberately minimal — no OAuth, no passkeys, no magic links, no rate limiting — because the goal is clarity and auditability.

I wrote it mainly to deeply understand edge-runtime auth constraints and to have a clean Apache-2.0 example that follows NIST SP 800-63B / SP 800-132 and OWASP guidance.

For production I'd almost always reach for Better Auth instead (https://www.better-auth.com) — this repo is not trying to compete with it.

Live demo: https://private-landing.vhsdev.workers.dev/

Repo: https://github.com/vhscom/private-landing

Happy to answer questions about the crypto choices, the refresh token revocation pattern, Turso schema, constant-time comparison, unicode pitfalls, etc.

TheTaytay 143 days 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 143 days ago | |

Appreciate it, TheTaytay!

usefulposter 143 days 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 143 days 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 143 days 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.

vhsdev 143 days ago | |

Everything you or your agent need to see is in the commit history.

chrisweekly 143 days 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.

Terretta 143 days ago |

> I wrote it

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

- 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

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; }