Authentication

It’s easy to secure your Modus app with authentication. Modus currently supports bearer token authentication, with additional authentication methods coming soon.

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Bearer tokens

Modus supports authentication via the Authorization header in HTTP requests. You can use the Authorization header to pass a bearer JSON Web Token (JWT) to your Modus app. The token authenticates the user and authorize access to resources.

To use bearer token authentication for your Modus app, be sure to set the auth property on your endpoint to "bearer-token" in your app manifest.

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Setting verification keys

Once set, Modus verifies tokens passed in the Authorization header of incoming requests against the public keys you provide. To enable this verification, you must pass the public keys using the MODUS_PEMS environment variable.

The value of the MODUS_PEMS environment variable should be a JSON object with the public keys as key-value pairs. This is an example of how to set the MODUS_PEMS environment variable:

export MODUS_PEMS='{\"key1\":\"-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\\nMIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAwJ9z1z1z1z1z1z\\n-----END PUBLIC KEY-----\"}'

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Verifying tokens

To verify the token, Modus uses the public keys passed via the MODUS_PEMS environment variable. If the token is verifiable with any of the verification keys provided, Modus decodes the JWT token and passes the decoded claims as an environment variable.

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Accessing claims

The decoded claims are available through the auth API in the Modus SDK.

To access the decoded claims, use the getJWTClaims() function. The function allows the user to pass in a class to deserialize the claims into, and returns an instance of the class with the claims.

This allows users to access the claims in the token and use them to authenticate and authorize users in their Modus app.