Applying JWTs

JWT is an open source standard used to define a solution for sending any information during the authentication and authorization between issuers and clients. Its goal is to generate access_token properties that are digitally signed, URL-safe, and always verifiable by the client. However, it is not perfectly safe because anyone can decode the token if needed. Thus, it is advisable not to include all the valuable and confidential information in the token string. A JWT is an effective way of providing OAuth2 and OpenID specifications with more reliable tokens than passwords.

Generating the secret key

But before we start building the authentication scheme, we first need to generate a secret key, which is an essential element in creating the signature. The JWT has a JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) header, which is the metadata that describes which algorithm to use for plain-text encoding, while the payload is the data we need to encode into the token. When...