jwt-simple-auth

JSON Web Token Authentication.

Using jwt-simple-auth

jwt-simple-auth is intended for use by servers / services and relies on external RSA digital certificates in order to carry out its operations. Use the supplied keygen.sh script if you need to create a public/private key pair.

Some services might use a private certificate to create a JSON Web Token, while another service might just use the public certificate to validate the authenticity of a token.

jwt-simple-auth works with two types of tokens: an access token and a refresh token. Access tokens are short lived (one hour by default) and will expire upon that time. You may use a refresh token to obtain a fresh new access token. The refresh token will also expire (one week by default) and at that point you'll need to create a new refresh token. In systems where users sign-in requesting a new refresh token requires entering valid credentials.

Load jwt-simple-auth as you would normally and load the private and public certificates. You can replace the loadCerts parameters with null if you only need to load a private or public certificate.

const jwtAuth = require('jwt-simple-auth');
jwtAuth.loadCerts('./server.pem', './server.pub');

Overriding default options:

The jwt-auth init member can be used to override default values. At this time there's only two default values: accessTokenExpirationInSeconds which as a default set to 3600 seconds or one hour and refreshTokenExpirationInSeconds which defaults to 2419200 or four weeks.

To set an access token expiration to only 10 seconds and a refresh token expiration to 60 seconds:

jwtAuth.init({
  accessTokenExpirationInSeconds: 10,
  refreshTokenExpirationInSeconds: 60
});

To create a JWT token:

const payload = {
  userID: 34,
  admin: true
};
jwtAuth.createToken(payload, 'access')
  .then((token) => {
    // token is now ready for use.
  });

To verify a JWT token:

jwtAuth.verifyToken(token, 'access')
  .then((response) => {
    // if valid, the response is decoded JWT payload, see verify token response below.
  });

Verify token response

{
  "userID": 34,
  "admin": true,
  "iss": "urn:auth",
  "jti": "2fd6th6tqfz101",
  "exp": 1466614755,
  "iat": 1466614754
}

To refresh a valid token:

jwtAuth.refreshToken(token)
  .then((newToken) => {
    // if original token was valid then a newToken is returned.
  });

To retrieve a hash of an existing token:

let hash = jwtAuth.getTokenHash(token);

This is useful when implementing a token management scheme.

Creating private and public certificates

You can use the supplied keygen.sh script to create certificates for use with jwt-auth.

$ ./keygen.sh

Tests

This project includes mocha/chai tests. Make sure you have mocha installed globally.

$ npm install mocha -g

Then run:

$ npm test