'How API Keys Compare to JWT Authorization: A Detailed Overview' algolia jwt
the user and the application. Of course, you could use API keys for user-level authorization, but it’s not well-designed for that – an ecosystem would need to generate and manage API keys for every user or session-id, which is unnecessarily burdensome for a system.In terms of security, both API keys and JWT are open to attacks. The best security measure is to implement a secure architecture for all end-to-end communications.
In contrast, API keys use their uniqueness to gain initial access; but then the API needs to find a key’s associated ACL in a central table to determine exactly what the key gives access to. Thus, every app in the ecosystem would have to be aware of the database. Each app would need to connect and read from that table. And some apps would be allowed to generate new keys or modify existing keys.
Additionally, APIs can be used in ways that differ from system to system. Worse, different apps share API keys and are therefore dependent on the different apps to maintain correct access levels of the shared API keys.Any API that requires authentication can easily switch over to JWT’s authorization. With JWT authorization, you get user-based authentication. Once the user is authenticated, the user gets a secure token that they can use on all systems.
In the end, the simplest and most robust and manageable approach is to create this single endpoint dedicated to doing both authentication & authorization, such that all other servers across the entire ecosystem can rely on that central point to authorize the API interactions between client and server.As an application developer, my primary concern when building APIs is that they are used properly and provide the correct data and functionality.
Third-party APIs should be easy to use and fast to implement, with little upfront work when integrating.