Stateful Authentication After successful authentication, the application generates a random token to send back to the client then creates a client authenticated session in memory or an internal database. What this function… If you are interested in the industrial design, you should definitely go for the specification of some authentication protocols. With that said, when talking about computer systems, a “state” is basically an entity’s condition or quality. In Stateful, the server thinks a client is just a dumb machine, while in Stateless, server things the client is an intelligent machine that doesn’t need to depend on any state on the server-side. In a stateful protocol, if a c…

Stateful Protocol require server to save the status and session information. To understand statelessness, one must understand statefulness. While in Stateless, the server does store data, but in a database to verify user/client whenever it needs to connect. To understand one, you need to understand the other. I simplify the examples here for better understanding. Not too long ago a hosting company simply set you up an account on a shared, or dedicated server in a single data centre somewhere. Each time the client makes a request to the server, the server locates the session memory using the reference Id from the client and finds the authentication information.In this model, you can easily imagine that if the session memory is deleted on the backend side, then the session reference Id, which the client is holding, is completely meaningless.Stateless authentication is used to solve the disadvantages of stateful authentication. The data is signed by the key of IdP to ensure the integrity and authority of the session data.Since the user session is stored on the client side, the server only have the capability to verify its validity by checking whether the payload and the signature match.It is obvious that they have opposite pros and cons. When a client tries to access the application with a token, the application verifies token sign with a private key, check if the token is expired, retrieves all session data from the token and makes a decision if a client has access to the desired resource.Both approaches make sense, both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Stateful: You can revoke the authentication session on the IdP anytime. To access the application as an identified client, the client uses the received authentication token.Authentication token could be Stateless and Stateful.After successful authentication, the application generates a random token to send back to the client then creates a client authenticated session in memory or an internal database.

At an instant in time, to be exact. … I do not list concrete protocols for discussion since those protocols may contain many other security design that will blur out the focus between the differences between stateful and stateless authentication.

In Stateless Protocol, there is no tight dependency between server and client. Stateless vs stateful authentication. In Stateful protocol, there is tight dependency between server and client. In the following section I am going to share an improved version of stateless authentication that can eliminate some disadvantages.With this improvement, we can have the scalability and performance advantages of stateless authentication. When a client tries to access the application with a given token, the application tries to retrieve session data from session storage, checks if session valid and then decides whether the client has access to the desired resource or not.After successful authentication, the application generates token with all necessary data, signs it with a public key and sends it back to a client. If you have learnt about networking, you may already heard about stateful and stateless, but in this article I am going to give these two adjectives other meanings.Stateful authentication is commonly used in many applications, especially for applications that do not require scalability too much.Stateful session is created on the backend side, and the corespondent session reference Id is sent to the client. This means that the users used to input their entries. Authentication used to be stateful for a long period of time. Stateless: The session expiration time is set when the authentication token is released. All user data used to be stored server-side. Though we still cannot revoke the session data immediately, while we can forbid its lifetime extension by revoking the refresh token.In this article, I illustrate the ideas of stateful and stateless authentication. There is a standard for token generation, it is JWT (JSON Web Token). Then the server creates an id session, store it server-side. To be stateful is to essentially rely on these moments in time. We can break this down even further — consider binary, a language of 1’s and 0’s.