A better use-case is having a third-party upstream service that you want your own service's users to be able to talk to directly — i.e. without using your service as an intermediary gateway. If you configure your third-party SaaS with your own JWT public key, you will be able to have your users

1. Log in with your service, receiving a JWT token

2. Send that token back to your service, as the auth key for authenticating as themselves with your service.

3. Also send that same token to the third party service, to authenticate requests against your service's account.

(One place where I just set this up the other day: allowing users of a crypto app to make authenticated requests to Infura via the MetaMask browser extension, where we're paying for the Infura credits to enable that. We send the user a JWT token; the client JS uses that token to build an Infura URL, and configures the MetaMask SDK with it. Infura accepts the requests as coming from "us" because it recognizes the JWT signing key we configured.)

We hit this case with a customer service where each “domain” (transaction management, fidelity, auth, catalog data, etc.) was handled by a different internal org, with an orchestrating layer on top.

Having the emitting entity sign their request in a standard format that can be checked by anything having with their public key helped a lot.

Most web frameworks support JWT out of the box so just calling a web service written in these means it is preferable to use an existing format rather than rolling your own.

Sure there are some gotchas but it isn't that hard to read up on that once, configure your JWT check and then leave it alone.

Also, we pass additional claims in the JWT that avoids the need for the web service having to check certain permissions or auth status itself (like what resources the user has requested) and this is going to be a mess if you try and "just HMAC(SHA256())"