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A comment on Ask HN: What's the recommended method of adding authentication to a REST API?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's the recommended method of adding authentic... by rapind on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @02:15PM (#16161261)
It's very possible I completely misunderstood your suggestion, however in case I didn't.

If you're storing the key on the client (cookie or w/e) and in the database and solely using it to authenticate, aren't you going to run into timing attacks if you're using it for retrieval?

What I typically do is also store a unique identifier like email for the lookup and then use a random key for comparison / validation.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the recommended method of adding authentic... by infogulch on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @04:51PM (#16163044)
Yeah could the DB token lookup timings by itself be used to find a real token? It might be several layers deep and DBs are noisy, but I think it's still possible in theory. Could you get around this by only storing some hash of both the token and a DB secret?
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