Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Request to Contribute: Signing using Managed Keys

Open
#928 0 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, node.js

Research direction

The existing signature code is the entry point; first read issue #427 and trace how signing options reach JWT creation. Define an API for supported managed-key providers and algorithms, then verify that JWTs can be created through those providers without exposing a private key.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Please do not report security vulnerabilities here. The Responsible Disclosure Program details the procedure for disclosing security issues.

Thank you in advance for helping us to improve this library! Your attention to detail here is greatly appreciated and will help us respond as quickly as possible. For general support or usage questions, use the Auth0 Community or Auth0 Support. Finally, to avoid duplicates, please search existing Issues before submitting one here.

By submitting an Issue to this repository, you agree to the terms within the Auth0 Code of Conduct.

Describe the problem you'd like to have solved

Popular cloud providers e.x. AWS + Google provide APIs for key signing that allow for asymetric encryption without the private key being accessible to code. It would be nice to be able to create JWTs with such APIs using this library.

Describe the ideal solution

There are different approaches to solving this but I think the right level might be to have some set of options like:

{
  alg: 'RSA256',
  pub: '...',
  sign: signFunc,
}

I read through the comments in issue https://github.com/auth0/node-jsonwebtoken/issues/427 which makes me think that it would be best to force usage of wellknown algorithms but provide a way to use third party key apis.

Alternatives and current work-arounds

Currently one would have to rebuild the entire signature code which is error prone.

Additional context

I'm happy to provide a pull request if we can agree on APIs

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
18.2k
Forks
1.3k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from auth0/node-jsonwebtoken

All issues in auth0/node-jsonwebtoken

Similar issues

More JavaScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.