How to protect the refresh token from hacker

user_2534236 0
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I googled a lot on how to protect the refresh_token from a hacker because it will be stored somewhere in browser's local-storage/cookie, so a hacker can easily steal those tokens and I couldn't able to find a proper answer so I came here.

I understand that access_token will expire in less-time and we should use refresh_token to get a new access_token. But if the hackers steal the refresh_token means, he can stay as a login user for a long time, right?

Some people are saying, you can protect it using client_id and client_secret, but the hacker is going to access the endpoint of the API, which has the client_id and client_secret. So again, a hacker can get a new access_token easily.

So I am finding no way to protect the hacker from getting the new access_token.

Can someone able to guide me here, on how I protect the hacker from getting access to refresh token from browser's local-storage/cookie?

refresh-token oauth-2.0 spring-security security
2 Answers

From the context of your explanation, you are talking about a browser based application. If this application is one that does not have a backend, then you do not have a secure place to store your long-lived tokens or client secrets.

From OAuth 2.0 perspective, these are called public clients. Thus protocol do not allow them to have a client secret. So they have a client ID and a redirect URL for client authentication (client identification). Implicit flow is one key flow suitable for SPA that runs on browser. By specification, they will not get a refresh token. Reason is their inability to protect such secrets.

But if you have a backend and have the ability to correlate browser session and backend storage, you can use a flow that gives your a refresh token and store it securely. But this require your application architecture to support such (ex:- Browser session and backend storage).

Also, rather than making end user to login every time, you may use the identity server's logged in state to skip log in. This too will rely on identity server's browser cookie and it's life time. For example identity server may have a browser session valid for 24hours. So your client will not see log in page when accessed thew application within the time.

user_31970550

You can try to secure the local storage using this library Secure-ls

user_60515960
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