Invalidating JSON Web Tokens

Question

For a new node.js project I\'m working on, I\'m thinking about switching over from a cookie based session approach (by this, I mean, storing an id to a key-value store conta

Answer 1

WITHOUT USING REFRESHING OF JWT...

2 scenarios of an attack come to mind. One is about compromised login credentials. And the other is an actual theft of JWT.

For compromised login credentials, when a new login happens, normally send the user an email notification. So, if the customer doesn't consent to being the one who logged in, they should be advised to do a reset of credentials, which should save to database/cache the date-time the password was last set (and set this too when user sets password during initial registration). Whenever a user action is being authorized, the date-time a user changed their password should be fetched from database/cache and compared to the date-time a given JWT was generated, and forbid the action for JWTs that were generated before the said date-time of credentials reset, hence essentially rendering such JWTs useless. That means save the date-time of generation of a JWT as a claim in the JWT itself. In ASP.NET Core, a policy/requirement can be used to do do this comparison, and on failure, the client is forbidden. This consequently logs out the user on the backend, globally, whenever a reset of credentials is done.

For actual theft of JWT... A theft of JWT is not easy to detect but a JWT that expires easily solves this. But what can be done to stop the attacker before the JWT expires? It is with an actual global logout. It is similar to what was described above for credentials reset. For this, normally save on database/cache the date-time a user initiated a global logout, and on authorizing a user action, get it and compare it to the date-time of generation of a given JWT too, and forbid the action for JWTs that were generated before the said date-time of global logout, hence essentially rendering such JWTs useless. This can be done using a policy/requirement in ASP.NET Core, as previously described.

Now, how do you detect the theft of JWT? My answer to this for now is to occasionally alert user to globally log out and log in again, as this would definitely log the attacker out.