Securing microservice communication with JWT

In this section, we are going to review some basic concepts of microservice security, such as authentication and authorization. You will learn how to implement such logic in Go using a popular JSON Web Token (JWT) protocol.

Let’s start with one of the primary aspects of security: authentication. Authentication is the process of verifying someone’s identity, such as via user credentials. When you log into some system, such as Gmail, you generally go through the authentication process by providing your login details (username and password). The system that performs authentication performs verification by comparing the provided data with the existing records it stores. Verification can take one or multiple steps: some types of authentication, such as two-factor authentication, require some additional actions, such as verifying access to a phone number via SMS.

A successful authentication often results in granting the caller...