Hands-On Swift 5 Microservices Development

JSON Web Tokens

In many other cases, however, we can use a more performant approach that does not compromise on security either: JSON Web Tokens (JWTs).

The approach differs only slightly from the preceding one:

1. The user logs in with the authentication manager.
2. The authentication manager returns a security token that contains the user information, encrypted.
3. Another microservice can now self-verify the token and get the relevant user information out of the token.

A JWT consists of three parts:

• Header: This describes the algorithm used for the signature as well as the nature of the token. In many cases, it looks similar to this: {"alg": "HS256", "typ": "JWT"}.
• Payload: Here we have the data we care about most, user information and timing ...