The JWT Confusion: Why You Are Probably Talking About JWS
When you start to familiarize yourself with JSON Web Tokens (JWT), you often encounter a number of related acronyms - JWS, JWA, JWK, etc, which can feel overwhelming at first. It is not always clear which concept comes “first”, how they relate to each other, or what the differences are. In this article, I want to briefly introduce these concepts and clarify the important distinction between JWT and JWS. History The JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) Working Group was formed in 2011 to standardize signing, encryption, and key representation mechanisms for JSON-based data. ...