Technically, once a token is signed – it is valid forever – unless the signing key is changed or expiration explicitly set. Add the bare minimum number of claims to the payload for best performance and security. Tokens are signed to protect against manipulation and are easily decoded.

Do not add sensitive data to the payload.The signing key should be treated like any other credentials and revealed only to services that absolutely need it. If the server could not verify the token, the server would send a 401 Unauthorized and a message saying that the request could not be processed as authorization could not be verified.īefore we actually get to implementing JWT, let’s cover some best practices to ensure token based authentication is properly implemented in your application. The server would attempt to verify the token and, if successful, would continue processing the request.

In a real world scenario, a client would make a request to the server and pass the token with the request. If we navigate over the jwt.io, and paste the above token, we’ll be able to read the header and payload – but without the correct secret, the token is useless and we see the message “Invalid Signature.” If we add the correct secret, in this example, the string we’ll now see a message saying “Signature Verified.” What this means is that a token can be easily decoded and its contents revealed. Tokens are signed to protect against manipulation, they are not encrypted. The final result looks like: eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJtZXNzYWdlIjoiSldUIFJ1bGVzISIsImlhdCI6MTQ1OTQ0ODExOSwiZXhwIjoxNDU5NDU0NTE5fQ.-yIVBD5b73C75osbmwwshQNRC7frWUYrqaTjTpza2y4 The payload contains the claims data that the token is encoding. The header consists of metadata including the type of token and the hashing algorithm used to sign the token. The header and payload are Base64 encoded, then concatenated by a period, finally the result is algorithmically signed producing a token in the form of. A JSON Web Token consists of three parts: Header, Payload and Signature.

New tokens