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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but how does this help in the case of a compromised token? Doesn't this assume the attacker hasn't also compromised the refresh token?

Presumably, the token and refresh token are both stored in the client-side app. If that gets compromised, the attacker now has the username/password combo they need to restore the session after the T+5mins has expired.




Since the refresh-token is single-use, the user will be logged out when trying to refresh their own token, and will presumably then login again, which should invalidate the attacker's refresh token.

But I agree it's not a perfect system. This is meant to specifically address the problems of long-lived tokens, since JWTs are hard to revoke without checking a blacklist on the server-side.

The main problem is that localStorage is more vulnerable to some classes of attacks than secure, http-only cookies.




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