JWT Security Concept

 So question is that If you can decode Json Web token, how they are secure ?

JWTs can be either signed, encrypted or both. If a token is signed, but not encrypted, everyone can read its contents, but when you don’t know the private key, you can’t change it. Otherwise, the receiver will notice that the signature won’t match anymore.

Answer to your comment: I’m not sure if I understand your comment the right way. Just to be sure: do you know and understand digital signatures? I’ll just briefly explain one variant (HMAC, which is symmetrical, but there are many others).

Let’s assume Alice wants to send a JWT to Bob. They both know some shared secret. Mallory doesn’t know that secret, but wants to interfere and change the JWT. To prevent that, Alice calculates Hash(payload + secret) and appends this as signature.

When receiving the message, Bob can also calculate Hash(payload + secret) to check whether the signature matches. If however, Mallory changes something in the content, she isn't able to calculate the matching signature (which would be Hash(newContent + secret)). She doesn't know the secret and has no way of finding it out. This means if she changes something, the signature won't match anymore, and Bob will simply not accept the JWT anymore.

Let’s suppose, I send another person the message {"id":1} and sign it with Hash(content + secret). (+ is just concatenation here). I use the SHA256 Hash function, and the signature I get is: 330e7b0775561c6e95797d4dd306a150046e239986f0a1373230fda0235bda8c. Now it's your turn: play the role of Mallory and try to sign the message {"id":2}. You can't because you don't know which secret I used. If I suppose that the recipient knows the secret, he CAN calculate the signature of any message and check if it's correct.

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