Access Token

An Access Token is a short-lived credential that can be used by an application to access an API. Its purpose is to inform that the bearer of this token has been authorized to access a specific API. Access Tokens should be sent to an API according to the Bearer token Usage specification. Specifically, the Access Token should be sent to the API in the HTTP Authorization header.

Refer to the API reference how to obtain an access token.

Opaque token

The Opaque access token is a random, 32-bits hex-encoded, string (64 characters). It does not contain any information about the validity of the token. The Opaque token is returned to all clients of a Mobile app and to the Web clients for which the Opaque token is configured.

Example Opaque Access Token

E19C77561880BBF24F9E60B0D9051401FE2216A93F8683438A0DF2169CFE078F

JSON Web Token (JWT)

The Token Server can issue a JWT as access token. However, the receiver does not have to treat it as a JWT but can also treat it as an opaque token and present it to the Token Server for validation. Refer to the Token Introspection documentation for details on validation an access token.

The JWT token is returned when this is configured for a web client. It contains the user identifier when the access token is created for a specific user.

Example JWT Access Token

In this section you can see an example of a JWT Access Token. A JWT contains three sections: a header, a payload and a signature. Only the header and payload sections are displayed in the example below.

Header

{
  "kid": "f463bf2c-81a6-4979-82a5-aa5d032b6fe5",
  "alg": "RS256"
}

Payload

{
  "ver": 1,
  "jti": "AT.d405c8b0-2afc-4720-a567-e890fecd28b2",
  "iss": "https://token-server.onegini.com/oauth",
  "aud": "profile-api",
  "iat": 1537437991,
  "nbf": 1537437991,
  "exp": 1537441591,
  "cid": "example-client",
  "scp": [
    "profile",
    "read"
  ],
  "scope": "profile read",
  "sub": "1c0e2c84-b05f-4c23-9175-c238f70901be",
  "usl": 5
}

The payload of a JWT Access Token contains a number of claims. These claims can be used to validate the Access Token but also tell for whom and what authorizations have been granted.

Claim	Description
ver	Version indication for this Access Token
jti	JWT ID. A unique identifier of this JWT
iss	Issuer of this Access Token
aud	Audiences that this token is intended for
iat	Time the Access Token was issued
nbf	Time before which the Access Token is not valid
exp	Time the Access Token expires
cid	Client ID of the client that requested the Access Token
scope	String value containing a space-separated list of scopes that were granted for this Access Token.
scp	[Deprecated] Array of scopes that were granted for this Access Token.
sub	User Identifier
usl	Usage Limit. Integer value that represents the usage limit for this Access Token
group_permissions	Group memberships and permissions. Requires configuration of the DUM Engine. The claim group_permissions is omitted when the size of the JWT Access Token exceeds the limit. This is to prevent that the JWT Access Token cannot be used to request data. When a group_permissions is expected, but it exceeds the limit, it can be requested via the token introspection endpoint.