@labdigital/federated-token v0.12.1

Federated Token

This package provides support for using JWT tokens for clients and passing that information to all federated services. The JWT token includes a JWE token for sensitive information like the client specific access tokens of third party systems.

It provides three Apollo specific classes:

• GatewayAuthPlugin - An Apollo plugin for the GraphQL gateway that verifies the signature of the token passed and decrypts the embedded JWE property. It stores the verified and decrypted token on the context as federatedToken.

• FederatedGraphQLDataSource - An Apollo GraphQL data source used in the GraphQL Gateway which passes the federatedToken from the context to the datasource (federated service) as x-access-token HTTP header.

• FederatedAuthPlugin - An Apollo plugin for federated services that reads the token passed in the x-access-token header and stores it on the context as federatedToken.

When a federated services creates a new token (when non exist) it can also return a refresh token in the x-refresh-token header. The gateway will then encrypt all refresh tokens and encrypt them before passing them to the client as x-refresh-token header.

Token sources

Public tokens can be passed via either HTTP headers or cookies. For browser clients cookies are the preferred way since these are easiest to store safely in the browser using a combination of HTTP_ONLY cookies and non-HTTP_ONLY cookies.

Cookie Token Source

This token source is used for browser clients to safely store the token. It is implemented via 4 cookies:

• accessToken - The JWT token
• tokenFingerprint - A random string that is used to protect the AccessToken cookie from CSRF attacks. It is stored as HTTP_ONLY cookie.
• refreshToken - The refresh token, if any. It is stored as HTTP_ONLY cookie.
• refreshTokenExists - A boolean value that indicates if a refresh token exists for the user. It is used to determine if the user is new or not.

Note that this expects the "cookie-parser" express middleware to be used.