Protect your API

Validate the API request's authorization token

Auth issues a standard JWT format authorization token for each authorized API request. The token is encrypted and signed as a JWS token.

Understanding JWS token

An encoded JWS token is constructed with three parts:

  • JOSE Header: Declares the code type and encoding algorithm

  • JWS Payload: Includes all the token's claims

  • JWS Signature: Signature signed with JWK

A standard schema of auth issued JWS Payload: (claims may vary, based on your custom OIDC config)

Key

Description

jti

unique JWT ID

sub

subject, usually user-id

iat

timestamp token issues at

exp

timestamp token expires at

client_id

client id

iss

token issuer identity

aud

audience of the token

INFO

For development, to visually inspect a JWT token, you could visit jwt.io to decode and check the tokens you received. Be careful with or never use the tokens from a production environment. As this is a third party provided public online service, your token may be exposed.

Validate the authorization token

  1. The token's issuer is https://<your-auth-domain> (issued by your Auth server).

  2. The token is within its expiration time.

There are various open-source libraries and packages that can help you to validate and decode a JWT token easily. You may pick one and integrate with your backend application based on the language and framework you are using. Please check some of the examples we have:

Reference

Auth uses the code-based OAuth 2.0 Authorization Protocol to make your API request safer. If you are interested in the strategy behind it, refer to OAuth 2.0's official document for more details.

Last updated