JSON Web Tokens provide a scalable solution with significant performance benefits for user access control in decentralized, large-scale distributed systems. Such examples would entail cloud-based, micro-services styled systems or typical Internet of Things solutions. One of the obstacles still preventing the wide-spread use of JSON Web Token–based access control is the problem of invalidating the issued tokens upon clients leaving the system. Token invalidation presently takes a considerable processing overhead or a drastically increased architectural complexity. Solving this problem without losing the main benefits of JSON Web Tokens still remains an open challenge which will be addressed in the article. We are going to propose some solutions to implement low-complexity token revocations and compare their characteristics in different environments with the traditional solutions. The proposed solutions have the benefit of preserving the advantages of JSON Web Tokens, while also adhering to stronger security constraints and possessing a finely tuneable performance cost.
JSON Web Tokens (JWT) provide a scalable, distributed way of user access control for modern web-based systems. The main advantage of the scheme is that the tokens are valid by themselves – through the use of digital signing – also imply its greatest weakness. Once issued, there is no trivial way to revoke a JWT token. In our work, we present a novel approach for this revocation problem, overcoming some of the problems of currently used solutions. To compare our solution to the established solutions, we also introduce the mathematical framework of comparison, which we ultimately test using real-world measurements.
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