Bearer tokens for securing communications

Bearer tokens are a fairly recent solution to a number of security, authentication, and authorization challenges that we have faced when developing modern applications. We have gone from working with standard desktop and web applications to catering to various internet-capable devices that have similar security needs. Before we start exploring what these modern security needs are, let us review some of the challenges that we have faced with web applications over the years.

When securing web applications, we face several challenges:

• We need a way to collect user information.
• We need a way to store user information.
• We need a way to validate user information. This is called authentication.
• We need a way to track the user’s authenticated state in between requests.
• We need a way to track what the user is allowed to do in our system. This is called authorization.
• We need to cater to various channels or device...