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Comment by 90s_dev | Hacker News Reader

> It’s often said that one sign of a standard having succeeded is that it’s used for things that the inventors never imagined.

It's certainly a sign of something's utility and versatility, for sure. Congrats.

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If you go back and search hacker news for any article involving JWTs or OAuth you’ll find hundreds of comments of circular arguments over what a JWT is and is not. People never seem to be able to separate the two.

I still don't really understand them. The last time I used them was for a client probably in 2016 or 2018, and I forgot everything I learned about them. But they have an RFC so that's pretty cool.

I think an easy way to think about them is it's just a json object, with some cryptographic crud glued to it that proves who created it.

JSON Web Tokens are part of the JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) family of standards which are really just containers for cryptographic primitives in a web-friendly representation. Most people are aware of JWS (signed payloads) but there are also JWE (encrypted payloads) and JWK (key payloads). If you're building any sort of cryptographic system that needs to represent encrypted/signed values or keys, you can use JOSE to represent these primitives without having to reinvent the wheel. By far the biggest use of JOSE is in authentication systems where JWS are used as signed bearer tokens but that's just one application and there are many others. They arent perfect, but they filled an important gap when they were created and made it much easier to deal with crypto at an application layer compared with all of hte binary formats that are used in things like TLS.

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