JSON Web Token and its Structure

In an SSO system that relies on OIDC and OAuth, authentication and authorization are done via a JSON Web Token (JWT)—a token that is issued by the IdP upon successful authentication. But how exactly does it work? We will cover that in this lesson.

Raw JWT structure

A JWT consists of three encoded strings separated by dots. The diagram below shows what a typical JWT looks like. Three distinct parts of JWT are denoted in different colors.