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Disallowing Validation of Expired Tokens

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, node.js

Research direction

Start by tracing the token validation flow and its use of node-jws's verify method. Determine how expiration is currently assessed and define tests for expired tokens being rejected before unnecessary signature processing, while valid-token verification remains unchanged.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

The Problem

The library first validates the signature of tokens before assessing their expiration status. This approach results in unnecessary CPU usage, as it not only validates signatures of expired tokens but also decodes them again using the verify method of node-jws. This double processing of expired but correctly signed tokens is inefficient and could be optimized.

The ideal solution

I would like the jsonwebtoken library to first verify if a token has expired before it checks the signature. This approach would improve efficiency and security by immediately discarding tokens that are no longer valid due to expiration.

Alternative

currently, one might manually check the expiration of the token before passing it to the library, but this adds extra steps and complexity to the authentication process.

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

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