![]() ![]() Whether you decide to go with tokens or good old sessions, you should take conscious and intentional steps toward tightening the security of your web application. No matter which one you choose to go with, there are a few things to keep in mind. This is the summarized version of what I've learned about the two approaches and I hope it helps you in taking an informed decision. To get the best of both worlds, you can choose to have a JWT token for non-sensitive read-only API endpoints and have your sessions for sensitive operations. Definitely not a good deal when you're looking to squeeze out all the performance gains. With sessions, you need to read from the data store on every request.Choosing allow or deny as a fallback/default is tricky. If the data store hosting the sessions is down, all your applications are effectively down. You need to take the responsibility of storing them server-side.Sessions, on the other hand, are said to be hard-to-scale due to two main reasons: For example, server-to-server communication can enjoy the token-based approach since instant revocation is not necessary. Thus, JWTs are said to be very apt for non-user-facing applications. Why? As we learned, revocation is not immediate. Revoking the JWT token is implementation dependent and if handled poorly, can pose security vulnerabilities.ĭue to the hard-to-revoke nature of JWTs, it is usually advised to not use them in user-facing applications where users can log out at will. Also, there's no agreed-upon way in the community to handle revocations “the right way”. You can store the user data in the JWT token itself. With JWT, you don't need to reach out to the data store. The client sends that session Id in every request and the server authenticates the user by reading from the data store using the session ID. With sessions, you store the actual user data in some kind of data store and only pass a session Id to the client. It really depends on your use case.īefore we come to a conclusion, let's make the differences between the two absolutely clear. Revoking the token immediately is a challenge.Tokens (should) have a shorter lifespan and it can impact user experience. Not suitable for applications that allow longer sessions (eg.Not to mention, the increase in latency with larger request headers. Switching to localStorage poses even more security concerns. Thus, it does not allow storing large tokens. Cookies have a maximum size limit of 4096 bytes.The secret key on the server side has to be extremely safe & secure from prying eyes.With that said, there are several downsides to going with the token-based approach: It is scalable due to its stateless nature.It helps you avoid the overhead of fetching session data from the data store. Some of the core benefits of using a token-based authentication mechanism are: log ( ` Server listening on port 4000 ` ) ) Pros and Cons of tokens Here's an example code snippet of the Express.js server authenticating the user:Ĥ5 app. As you might have noticed, fetching entries from a database or even a cache is overhead. The session gets stored in the database, cache, or local memory of your application server. The server, on each request, validates the session and allows the client to access protected resources and perform authorized actions. Upon successful login, the client sends that session Id cookie with every request. The session on the server side contains user identification information as well as some meta information like expiration, time of creation, email address, etc. The client stores that session ID in the cookies. Whenever a user logs in, the server creates a session and returns the session ID to the client. Username and password authentication is simple and straightforward in scope and convenience. While Single Sign-on (SSO) authenticates users across a pool of applications at once. ![]() Multi-factor authentication ensures tighter security. sending login link to your email address)īased on the scope, convenience, and security guarantees, there are multiple ways to authenticate.
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