In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about authentication — the difference between localStorage, cookies, session, tokens and more!

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Show Notes

4:20 - How should we track users?

Token based - generally stored in the client
Session based - stored on the server
Token Based (JWT)

6:00 - Token-based auth

Stateless - the server does not maintain a list of logged in users
Scalable - you can use serverless functions easily
Cross domain
Data can be stored in JWT
Easy to use on non-web sites like mobile apps
Hard to expire tokens — you must maintain a list of blacklisted tokens

7:48 - Session-based auth

Stateful - generally you maintain a list of session IDs
Passive - once signed in, no need to send token again
Easy to destroy sessions

10:48 - How do we identify the user on each request? localStorage or Cookies?

A common misconception is that localStorage is for tokens while cookies is for sessions
With localStorage, we need to grab the token and send them along on each request
With cookies, the data is sent along on each request

11:25 - Security Issues

XSS for Tokens - make sure bad actors can’t run code on your site
Sanitize inputs
XSRF - CSRF tokens are needed

Links

Cookies vs Tokens: The Definitive Guide

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Hasty Treat - Authentication: LocalStorage vs Cookies vs Sessions vs Tokens

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