Two credentials, two threat models: auth for a content API

A headless content API has two kinds of callers, and it's tempting to secure them the same way. That's the mistake. There's a human logging into an admin UI to edit content, and there's a machine — a website, a build step — pulling published content through a delivery endpoint. They authenticate with different credentials, and those credentials have opposite properties. Treat them identically and you either make the machine path painfully slow or the human path dangerously weak. I built a small headless content API ( Depot ) partly to get this boundary right. Here's the reasoning. The two credentials A session proves "this human is logged in." Short-lived, rides in an httpOnly cookie, checked on management routes. A delivery token proves "this machine may read this account's published content." Long-lived, sent as a Bearer header, checked on every public read. Two auth surfaces, kept explicit: /** * - requireUser() — admin session (httpOnly JWT cookie) for the management API. * - requireToken() — a `depot_…` bearer token for the public delivery API. */ Why they get different hashing Here's the part people get wrong. Both credentials get stored as hashes — never plaintext — but not the same kind of hash , and the reason is entropy. Passwords are low-entropy. Humans pick summer2024 . An attacker who steals your DB will brute-force guesses against the stored hashes, so you want hashing to be deliberately slow — that's exactly what bcrypt's cost factor buys you: import bcrypt from " bcryptjs " ; const ROUNDS = 10 ; // deliberately slow — the point is to resist brute force export function hashPassword ( plain : string ): Promise < string > { return bcrypt . hash ( plain , ROUNDS ); } export function verifyPassword ( plain : string , hash : string ): Promise < boolean > { return bcrypt . compare ( plain , hash ); } Tokens are high-entropy. I generate them — 32 random bytes — so there's nothing to guess. A stolen hash can't be reversed by brute force because the keyspace i