Designing Secure Authentication with Access & Refresh Tokens

Table of Contents Why Tokens Exist Access Token Refresh Token Authentication Flow Why Not a Single Token Security Best Practices Token Storage Options Logout and Revocation Common Backend Mistakes JWT vs Session-Based Authentication When to Use Access & Refresh Tokens Reference Links Why Tokens Exist HTTP is stateless. Tokens represent user identity across requests. Access Token 🔑 Access tokens are generally distributed as JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), a small, self-contained format valued for it