For up-to-date product documentation, see the IBM MobileFirst Foundation Developer Center.

Access tokens

Learn more about the access tokens that are generated by the security framework, and how to configure these tokens.

A MobileFirst access token is a digitally signed entity that describes the authorization permissions of a client. After the client's authorization request for a specific scope is granted, and the client is authenticated, the authorization server's token endpoint sends the client an HTTP response that contains the requested access token. For more about the authorization flow and token-generation process, see End-to-end authorization flow.

Note: The access token is signed with the MobileFirst Server keystore. For production-level security, configure the server to use your own keystore. See Configure the MobileFirst Server keystore.

Structure of the MobileFirst access token

The MobileFirst access token contains the following information:

• Client ID - a unique identifier of the client.
• Scope - the scope for which the token was granted (see OAuth scopes). This scope does not include the mandatory application scope (see Configure a mandatory application scope).
• Token-expiration time - the time at which the token becomes invalid (expires), in seconds. See Token expiration.

Token expiration

The granted access token remains valid until its expiration time elapses. The access token's expiration time is set to the shortest expiration time from among the expiration times of all the security checks in the scope. But if the period until the shortest expiration time is longer than the application's maximum token-expiration period, the token's expiration time is set to the current time plus the maximum expiration period. The default maximum token-expiration period (validity duration) is 3,600 seconds (1 hour), but it can be configured by setting the value of the maxTokenExpiration application-descriptor property. See Configure the maximum access-token expiration period.

• Configure the maximum access-token expiration period
  Configure the maximum validity duration (expiration period) of access tokens that are obtained by the application.
• Access-token response
  Learn about the structure of a successful response to a client's access-token acquisition request.

Parent topic: MobileFirst security framework