Exploring JSON Web Tokens: Unlocking Secure Authentication in Modern Applications

Although JWT is commonly used for managing authorization, the idea behind JWT is to define a standard way for two parties to communicate information securely.

RFC7519 standard simply dictates - how the JSON data should be structured - ways to encrypt it - ways to sign it

First, a JWT has a strictly defined structure to represent your data. A JWT token structure contains three parts, and each part is separated by a comma. HEADER. PAYLOAD.SIGNATURE

A JWT token simply ensures that your data is not tempered. To temper the data, you'll need the secret_key. All this is achieved using the signature part of the token. signature = HEADER + PAYLOAD + a_secret_key.

A few other characteristics of a JWT token are that it's compact, self-contained, and fast.

• Compact because it's just a simple string, it can be easily sent/receive via URL, post, and HTTP headers. This also helps in faster transfer.

• Self-contained because this encoded string contains all the required info about the user.
• Fast because since we've all the info available in the token, we can avoid making user details query to the database more than once