25/01/2024, 11:42 SDC#18 - JSON Web Tokens and Authentication

SDC#18 - JSON Web Tokens and

Authentication
A Big Interview Mistake and More...
SAURABH DASHORA
6 DEC 2023

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Hello, this is Saurabh… 👋

Welcome to the 141 new subscribers who have joined us since last week.

If you aren’t subscribed yet, join 2000+ curious Software Engineers looking to expand their
system design knowledge by subscribing to this newsletter.

In this edition, I cover the following topics:

🖥 System Design Concept → JSON Web Tokens

🍔 Food For Thought → A Big Interview Mistake
So, let’s dive in.

🖥 JSON Web Tokens

JSON Web Tokens or JWTs (pronounced as JOTs) is a standard for defining tokens.

You can use them to represent claims between two parties in a secure manner.

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A single JWT can contain all the required information about an entity, making it an
ideal candidate for authentication.

Here’s what a typical JSON Web Token may look like:

eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.
eyJzdWIiOiIxMjM0NTY3ODkwIiwibmFtZSI6IkpvaG4gRG9lIiwiYWRtaW4iOnR
ydWV9.
TJVA95OrM7E2cBab30RMHrHDcEfxjoYZgeFONFh7HgQ

Looks like gibberish?

In reality, it’s a compact, printable representation of a series of claims, along with a

signature to verify its authenticity.

This makes them an ideal candidate for authentication.

Unlike session-based authentication, the server receiving a JWT doesn’t need to

check a session storage to validate the token. The JWT has all the necessary details.

We did talk about session-based authentication in an earlier post:

SDC#16 - Cookies and Sessions

SAURABH DASHORA · 5 DECEMBER 2023
Read full story

The Components of a JWT

There are three main components of a JSON Web Token.

Here’s an illustration:

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You can play around with the image on Eraser.io

Let’s look at each component one by one:

Header
Every JWT carries a header with claims about itself. These claims specify the
algorithms used for signing and/or encrypting the JWT.

The only mandatory claim for an unencrypted JWT header is the alg claim.

It specifies the main algorithm such as HMAC SHA256 or RSA used for signing and
decrypting this particular JWT.

However, for unencrypted JWT, alg is as follows:

{
"alg": none
}

Other header claims are optional and include the typ and cty claims:

typ specifies the type of the token i.e. “JWT”

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cty is the content type and is needed for cases where the payload of a JWT is
another JWT.

Payload
The second part of the token is the payload, which contains the claims and the user
data.

There are three types of claims:

Registered claims or predefined set of claims that are not mandatory but
recommended. For example, issuer (iss), expiration time (exp), subject (sub), and
so on.

Public claims are claims registered with the IANA JWT Claims registry.

Private claims that can be defined by the users (consumers and producers) of the
JWTs

Signature
The signature part of the JWT is created by taking the encoded header, encoded
payload, a secret key, and the algorithm specified in the header and signing it.

The goal of the signature is to verify that the message wasn’t changed along the way.
The receiver can use the signature to verify whether the sender of the JWT is who it
says it is.

Thanks for reading System Design Codex!

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support my work.

JWTs versus Session-Based Authentication

This is an eternal debate full of confusion.

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But if you cut through the clutter, the debate ultimately boils down to just one thing -
stateless vs stateful authentication.

With session-based authentication, you store the session information in a database or

a session store.

Here’s how the whole process works:

The user makes a login request

The frontend sends the request to the backend server

The backend creates a session using a secret key and stores the session
information in some sort of storage (database or cache)

Next, the server sends a cookie back to the client (the browser)

However, the cookie contains the unique identifier for the session

The user makes a new request to view another page

The browser sends the session ID as part of the cookie and the server can verify
the session and the user details using this ID

Check the below sequence diagram for reference:

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The sequence diagram is generated via code. You can play around with the
diagram and code on Eraser.io

Here’s a more simplified look at the same process:

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You can play around with the diagram on Eraser.io

But what about JWT-based authentication?

The process is quite similar except for one major difference.

You don’t store a session in the session store.

Here’s how the JWT-based flow works:

The user makes a login request

The authentication server verifies the credentials and issues a JWT. This JWT is
signed using a private key. No database call is made

The JWT is passed to the browser using a cookie.

For every subsequent request to the server, the browser sends the cookie
containing the JWT.

The server can use the secret private key to validate the JWT and get the user
information. No database call is needed.

Check the below sequence diagram for reference:

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The sequence diagram is generated via code. You can play around with the
code and diagram on Eraser.io

Also, here’s a more simplified look at the same process:

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You can play around with the diagram on Eraser.io

Pros of JWT
JWTs offer some cool benefits such as:

You don’t need a separate storage for the session data. The entire information is
right there in the JWT

It’s also easier to scale the client and the server.

Cons of JWT
JWTs also have some important disadvantages as well that you must consider before
adopting them:

1 - Invalidation
Once your server signs a JWT, it’s not easy to invalidate it.

If the signature is valid and the JWT’s expiry timestamp has not passed, it will be
considered valid by the server.

This is a big problem.

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If a user requests to log out of all devices, there is no easy way of doing this. You can
theoretically revoke the secret key used to sign the JWT but that would invalidate all
JWTs used by that key.

With session-based authentication, you can easily revoke a particular session ID by

deleting it from the storage.

You could go for the solution to keep track of invalidated tokens but that introduces
stateful behavior similar to sessions. In defense of this point, however, the list of
invalidated tokens will be far smaller than the list of valid sessions in the session-
based approach.

2 - JWTs take up more space

JWT tokens are not exactly small.

When using stateless JWT tokens, where all the data is encoded directly into the
token, you will quickly exceed the size limit of a cookie or URL.

Sure, you might try to store it in Local Storage, but that opens you up to security
risks.

3 - Stale Data
Similar to a cache, the data in a stateless token can “go stale”, and no longer reflect
the latest version of the data in your database.

This can be a serious security concern.

For example, it can mean that somebody has a token with the role of “admin” even
though you may have revoked their “admin role”. Since there’s no easy way to
invalidate a token, you may find it hard to remove their administrator access reliably.

Best Practices for using JWTs

Despite their possible shortcomings, JWTs are still quite popular and I’m not
discouraging you from using JWTs.

However, here are some best practices that can help you out:

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Always validate the signature of the JWT to ensure that it hasn't been tampered
with. The signature provides integrity to the token and ensures that the claims
have not been altered.

When signing JWTs use strong unique secrets for each environment
(development, production, etc.). Make sure that the private key is secure.

Set a reasonable expiration time for your JWTs. The chance for an attacker to
misuse a stolen token is less likely.

Implement token refresh, so that the user doesn't need to re-enter their
credentials. This way you don’t have the risk of long-lived tokens.

If storing tokens on the client side, ensure they are stored securely. For web
applications, using HttpOnly and Secure flags for cookies can enhance security.

Implement mechanisms for token revocation in case a token needs to be

invalidated before its expiration date.

Thanks for reading System Design Codex!

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and
support my work.

🍔 Food For Thought

👉 Avoid Bragging in an Interview
A real interview situation I witnessed.

The candidate told the panelist that he learned a new technology every month.

The panelist got interested and asked what was the last thing he learned.

The candidate answered - “Kubernetes”

The panelist started asking a few questions about Kubernetes

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But the candidate couldn’t answer and revealed that by learning he meant he had
just watched a few YouTube videos and had no practical experience.

Needless to say, the interview didn’t go too well. Trust was broken and the candidate
was rejected.

There were some hard-hitting lessons from this situation that apply to everyone
looking to ace their interviews.

I shared them on X(Twitter) and the response from the folks was overwhelming.

Do check out the post below as well as the responses 👇

https://x.com/ProgressiveCod2/status/1730201296257564741?s=20

👉 Non-Stop Meetings for Senior Engineers

As you become a senior engineer, you’re expected to attend more meetings.

And the more time you spend in meetings, the less you can focus on your tasks.

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Would you be okay to stay at the “engineer” level if it meant avoiding non-stop
meetings?

The below post raises an important question 👇

That’s it for today! ☀️

Enjoyed this issue of the newsletter?

Share with your friends and colleagues

See you later with another value-packed edition — Saurabh

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Write a comment...

Kishore Dec 27, 2023 Liked by Saurabh Dashora

Thanks a ton for sharing mate 🙏🏻 ... Just curious how the JWT / session roles would
have their roles during sign up or create an account.
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