[supermatt]

you can use signed cookies for sessions - which have none of the drawbacks you mentioned. i.e. session data and expiration form the payload, and you sign the payload - then you validate the expiration and signature on subsequent requests.

[imnotjames]

Assuming you mean express' cookie parser signed cookies? Or maybe rails?

Solves some of the session problems..

Benefits:

Cookies - when set to http only + secure only are safer?

Drawbacks:

They're not cross-compatible No expiration baked in No not-before baked in Limited to hmac validation (no public key crypto options that I know of)

Unless you mean using a JWT as a cookie value. I guess that could work?

[supermatt]

no - i mean the generic concept of a signed cookie as I described, which would have none of the drawbacks you mentioned. They can even be encrypted, if desired.

There are many, many implementations in use "in the wild". They are just signed payloads, so they can contain "expiration", "not-before" or whatever else you think isnt "baked-in". You can use any method of signing them, but would probably make sense to use a strategy that is considered secure :) No doubt the libs you mention can be extended trivially with this "missing" functionality.

Signed/encrypted cookies predate JWT - they even predate JSON...

Im not presuming that they are better/worse than JWT, just responding to the incorrect statement about cookie based sessions requiring server-side storage