This guide explains why access token validation is important and how to validate and decode the access token.
If you're building a modern app or API, you want to know if your end user is authenticated. This is important to give context or to protect APIs from unauthenticated users. You can use Okta to authenticate your end users and issue them signed access and ID tokens. Your app can then use these tokens. It's important that your app uses only the access token to grant access, and not the ID token. See Access tokens vs ID tokens.
After signed tokens are issued to end users, they can be passed to your app for validation. There are two ways to verify a token: locally or remotely with Okta. The token is signed with a JSON Web Key (JWK) using the RS256 algorithm. To validate the signature, Okta provides your app with a public key that you can use.
Access tokens are intended for authorizing access to a resource. It's important that the resource server (your server-side app) accepts only an access token from a client.
ID tokens, on the other hand, are intended for authentication. They provide information about the resource owner so that you can verify that they're who they say they are. Authentication is important to clients. Because of this, when a client makes an authentication request, the ID token that's returned contains the client_id in the ID token's aud claim.
Decode the access token, which is in JWT format. This involves the following steps:
Alternatively, you can validate an access or refresh token using the Token Introspection endpoint: Introspection request(opens new window). This endpoint takes your token as a URL query parameter and returns a simple JSON response with a Boolean active property.
This involves a network request that is slower for performing validation. But, you can use it when you want to guarantee that the access token hasn't been revoked.
Before we actually get to implementing JWT, let's cover some best practices to ensure token based authentication is properly implemented in your application.
You can validate your tokens locally by parsing the token, verifying the token signature, and validating the claims that are stored in the token. Parse the tokens. The JSON Web Token (JWT) is a standard way of securely passing information. It consists of three main parts: Header, Payload, and Signature.
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Another way to manage access tokens is by revoking them when they are no longer needed or when they are compromised. Token revocation is the process of invalidating a token before it expires, thereby preventing it from being used to access protected resources.
Token validation is the mechanism by which an API validates the authenticity and longevity of access tokens. The mechanism to validate a token varies between applications, but for the most part, it comprises decoding the payload, parsing the properties, and performing further queries to validate credentials.
To validate an opaque token, the recipient of the token needs to call the server that issued the token. In Auth0's case, opaque tokens can be used with the /userinfo endpoint to return a user's profile. If you receive an opaque Access Token, you don't need to validate it.
The second way to pass your API token is via a query parameter called key in the URL like below. Use of the X-Dataverse-key HTTP header form is preferred to passing key in the URL because query parameters like key appear in URLs and might accidentally get shared, exposing your API token. (Again it's like a password.)
For any access token to be valid, the following must be asserted: Signature is valid.The private key signed the token, and this private key has a corresponding public key in the JWKS response from the authorization server.
You can obtain public key by calling the public Azure AD OpenID configuration endpoint: https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant_id}/discovery/keys?appid={client_id} and verify against the private key generated by Azure AD token. For validation, developers can decode JWTs using jwt.ms and verify against "kid" claim.
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