JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are used everywhere (even places they shouldn’t be). This post will cover the basics of what you need to know about JWT and the related specifications in the Javascript Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) family.

The topic of validating an OAuth 2.0 access tokens comes up frequently on this blog. Often we talk about how to validate JSON Web Token (JWT) based access tokens; however, this is NOT part of the OAuth 2.0 specification. JWTs are so commonly used that Spring Security supported them before adding support for remotely validating tokens (which is part of the OAuth 2.0 specification.)

This screencast walks you through creating JWTs with the Java library JJWT.