Building RESTful Web services with Go

JSON web token format

All we discussed in the preceding section was circling around a JWT token. We are going to see here what it really looks like and how it is produced. JWT is a string that is generated after performing few a steps. They are as follows:

1. Create a JWT header by doing Base64Url encoding on the header JSON.
2. Create a JWT payload by doing Base64Url encoding on the payload JSON.
3. Create a signature by encrypting the appended header and payload using a secret key.
4. JWT string can be obtained by appending the header, payload, and signature.

A header is a simple JSON object. It looks like the following code snippet in Go:

`{  "alg": "HS256",  "typ": "JWT"}`

"alg" is a short form for the algorithm (HMAC with SHA-256) used for creating ...