[owaislone]

JWTs are awesome but they are are being overused by people. People use them in web, on mobile and everywhere in between. Places where cookie or bearer token auth has already solved the problems. JWTs strength is that it can be verified independently without real-time coordination between services. So a service can issue a JWT with auth scopes to a user. The user can take the JWT to any other service and if that service trusts the signer, it'll allow the user access and also get basic user info from the token itself. The service doesn't need to make an API call to the issuing service or even know if/where it exists. That is where JWT is really powerful.

For web/mobile auth where same server issues the JWT and same server verifies it, it makes no sense. JWTs cannot be invalidated. If a user loses some permission or account gets disabled, JWT will still be valid until its expiration time. Servers must either make DB calls to verify the user is still active or be fine with deactivated users having access for a while after account is disabled. This completely defeats the purpose and bearer tokens work perfectly for this use case.

JWTs should _almost_ never be used in client side auth. Client should send regular cookies and bearer tokens. The auth server can internally generate a short lived JWT and inject it into requests before they get routed to various services internally so those services don't need to query DB every time to verify the user.

[carter2099]

> Servers must ... make DB calls to verify the user is still active

I'm not being facetious, genuinely asking - is this a big deal? Should be a pretty cheap query, and with pooled connections, hardly any overhead.

[owaislone]

Depends. If you backend is just one service, it is not a big deal but then you don't JWT at all. You just need a regular cookie/token.

If your backend is a set of 12 services where each needs to verify the authenticity of the request then it might start adding up. In that case using JWT _after_ the initial API gateway makes a lot of sense. The gateway hits the DB, authenticates the request, mints a JWT and injects it into downstream requests. Then each service on the request path just verifies the JWT.

Overall I don't think hitting the DB for auth is a big deal and that is why we don't need all the bells and whistles JWT brings. Just use bearer auth.