Cotter's OAuth 2.0 Tokens Specification
Allowing Cotter handling your full authentication is the fastest way to get your whole authentication suite setup. Cotter can generate an access token, id token, and refresh tokens for you.
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Allowing Cotter handling your full authentication is the fastest way to get your whole authentication suite setup. Cotter can generate an access token, id token, and refresh tokens for you.
Last updated
After successful authentication, Cotter returns ID, access, and refresh tokens as defined by the OpenID Connect (OIDC) open standard:
The contains information about the authenticated user such as email , phone number , client_user_id (the user's id in your server), and auth_time (last authenticated time).
The contains scopes and the authentication method used to authenticate the user: OTP, TRUSTED DEVICE , PIN or BIOMETRIC .
The contains the information necessary to obtain a new ID and access token.
🔒It is important to secure all tokens in transit and storage.
Currently, we have the following libraries available to handle Cotter's OAuth Tokens:
Cotter Token JS for Decoding JWT Tokens:
Cotter Node for validating JWT Tokens in your server:
Cotter's Access token is a that is used to tell your backend API that the user has been authorized to call the API and perform some action (defined in the scopes attribute of the token).
Access tokens expires every 1 hour. .
Token example:
1. On every API call to your server, attach the access token as a header
2. In your server, using a middleware, check if the access token is valid
3. If the access token is valid, allow the API call to proceed.
Easily get tokens using the SDK by adding a simple paramater, ex. getOAuthToken = true
The SDK generally automatically store tokens securely for you, and provides a function to easily remove the tokens to logout your users.
The SDK generally automatically renews expired access_token and id_token whenever a valid refresh_token exists.
You need to verify the JWT tokens in your backend server. Fortunately, there are a lot of good libraries that do this.
If you have additional metadata from your backend server that you'd like to add to the JWT token (for example, the user's role or name, you can call Cotter's API to add the claims to Cotter's JWT token
Cotter's ID token is a that is used to provide information about the user. ID tokens expires every 1 hour. .
Cotter's Refresh Token is an opaque token (i.e. a random string) that is used to generate a new access token and id token when they're expired. Refresh tokens expires every 30 days. You need to re-authenticate the user to get a new refresh token. .