[ale_jrb]

This is true, but kicking off a large subset of the userbase every time an account is compromised (or more realistically, every time someone changes their password—which should certainly invalidate their old tokens) isn't going to be a valid trade off for most applications with customers.

[floatrock]

A 'standard' JWT claim is Issued-At ('iat'). If you want lightweight JWT's, you're going to be loading minimal user data serverside anyways (logging, roles, etc.) -- it's trivial to compare the iat timestamp to a 'last change' field in your user object.

Of course, this gets to the point of the article -- if you're loading data serverside, that's not reeeaaallly the intended multi-party-claim-exchange use case of JWT's....

[kbenson]

You don't have to kick them off. You can make it a trigger to just check whether their session has been invalidated. Store last password change date or something similar, and if the db user is still valid and the password date is older than the JWT creation date, just update the JWT and let them continue. If not, require a new login procedure or deny outright, depending on account status.

> every time someone changes their password—which should certainly invalidate their old tokens

Using a variation of above, you can just reverify the JWT every X minutes, and know that if you change a password for normal reasons all JWT tokens will be invalidated within X minutes.

It's a trade off. If you can live with what you're trading (or at least live with it after mitigations are put in place), it might be worth it.

[bearjaws]

We tie our users session in the JWT to the session in a central database, this allows us to invalidate individual sessions.

The reason for using JWT is that the UI and backend consume the same session object seamlessly. Before what we got in our PHP session and what state we shared with the UI were manually kept in sync through a API request.

[philsnow]

> session object

what fields are in this session object besides an identifier?

[unclebucknasty]

>It's a trade off

But, what are you getting for this added complexity--above and beyond what "traditional" user session management provides?

[kbenson]

You can serve pages that don't require DB access without ever hitting the DB. Static content that is restricted to authed accounts is able to be served immediately and directly. Requests that access resources other then ones shared with the auth system do not need to first access the auth system to verify the account. Even if the auth system is on the same DB as the rest of the content, it's no longer a sequential bottleneck.

[unclebucknasty]

Yeah, I can see scenarios where these features would be useful, but wonder how many architectures truly benefit from it? I'd guess that a good many people implement JWT b/c it's the accepted approach or in premature anticipation of a future scaled-out architecture that would land it more in one of the beneficial scenarios.

Of course, if the DB concern is one of performance, then there's also a performance trade-off with JWT since the (sometimes large) token is constantly transferred over the wire and compute is used to decrypt it. That may be faster than a DB-round trip, but it's not free. Of course, "old-school" session-management keeps the auth state in memory server-side, which can be the fastest--though comes with a memory hit. But, constantly processing the token in-memory also assigns a memory penalty (even if slightly more transient).

In any case, I think it's like a lot of popular tech that evokes strong reactions on both sides: The success of the tech causes it to be overused, invariably in use-cases for which it isn't as well-suited or was not originally designed.

In this case, the important need for session expiration alone makes me question hard whether JWT is a good fit for session management in a lot of user-facing apps. In some cases it will be, but in others, there are probably better solutions.

[kbenson]

Sure, I'm not making a case for using JWT, I'm just noting the options and capabilities that you have if you do, which I think weren't accurately expressed initially.

There are cases where JWT can make a lot of sense. For example, a high capacity API where you don't necessarily want to check auth for every request, especially if you can rely on some sort of caching infrastructure. In that case it may make sense to use JWT, re-check the authentication on some set schedule (whether once an hour or day), and save yourself what might be a few thousand authentications a minute.

[unclebucknasty]

Yeah, I always thought the API scenario was the original use case for JWT anyway and believe that it does makes more sense. I think API token expiry is a requirement too, but not as pressing or frequent as on the user-side.

With the advent of SPAs and RESTful designs, it was probably tempting to say, "hey, let's allow our user-facing client apps to hit the API directly and use the same JWT token scheme for auth there". So, whereas it was generally a good scheme for APIs, it became a YMMV thing once it diverged into the client.