Authentication on the web

Running web services safely on public interfaces is itself challenge and a lot of things need to be taken care of. While many details fall within the job description of a security engineer, developers should adhere to at least a minimum set of best practices so they rightfully earn the trust of their users. At the start, there is transport encryption (TLS), which is something we did not include in any recipes in this chapter since reverse proxies and load balancers provide amazing and simple integration for this (and let's encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/ provides free certificates). This chapter focuses on using the actix-web middleware infrastructure to authenticate requests via JWT (https://jwt.io/) at the application layer.

Getting ready

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