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Stateless JWTs have a logout problem — and enterprise customers will find it

Blog post from WorkOS

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Zack Proser
Word Count
1,021
Company Posts That Month
32
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Post removed?
No
Summary

Stateless JWTs enable efficient, horizontally scalable authentication because servers can verify signed tokens locally, but they cannot revoke a token before its expiration, creating an access window after a user is deactivated. Session-backed systems support immediate revocation by deleting server-side session records, while JWT-based systems must reintroduce state either through short-lived access tokens paired with rotating refresh tokens or through a per-request denylist lookup. Short access-token lifetimes and refresh-token rotation are generally favored because deactivated users are denied new tokens at the next refresh boundary, while rotation can also detect replayed refresh tokens and trigger revocation of an entire token family after suspected theft. This limitation becomes especially important for enterprise SCIM offboarding workflows, where deprovisioning events must quickly prevent former employees from retaining access, making token lifetime a direct tradeoff between security and operational efficiency.

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