Validate Access Tokens (2024)

An access token is meant for an API and should be validated only by the API for which it was intended.

If any of these checks fail, the token is considered invalid, and the request must be rejected with 401 Unauthorized result.

1. Perform standard JWT validation. Because the access token is a JWT, you need to perform the standard JWT validation steps. See Validate JSON Web Tokens for details.

2. Verify token audience claims. If you've performed the standard JWT validation, you have already decoded the JWT's payload and looked at its standard claims. The token audience claim (aud, array of strings) depends on the initial token request. The aud field could contain both an audience corresponding to your custom API and an audience corresponding to the /userinfo endpoint. At least one of the audience values for the token must match the unique identifier of the target API as defined in your API's Settings in the Identifier field. See Get Access Tokens for details.

3. Verify permissions (scopes). Verify that the application has been granted the permissions required to access your API. To do so, you will need to check the scope claim (scope, space-separated list of strings) in the decoded JWT's payload. It should match the permissions required for the endpoint being accessed. For example, if your custom API provides three endpoints to read, create, or delete a user record, when you registered your API with Auth0, you created three corresponding permissions:

   1. create:users provides access to the /create endpoint

   2. read:users provides access to the /read endpoint

   3. delete:users provides access to the /delete endpoint

   In this case, if an application requests access the /create endpoint, but the access token's scope claim does not include the value create:users, then the API should reject the request.

• Get Access Tokens
• Use Access Tokens
• Management API Access Tokens
• Get Management API Access Tokens for Testing
• Get Management API Access Tokens for Production
• Token Best Practices