[proposal] Improvements to the verification API

[mirceanis]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The verification of JWT/JWS uses exceptions to signal failures, but this creates a problem in distinguishing between legitimate failures (bad signature, invalid audience, timestamp issue, etc) and exceptional situations (network timeout while resolving DID, malformed input, unsupported algorithm, etc).

I propose separating these 2 scenarios internally so that users get a better idea about what failed and so that control flow for invalid JWTs no longer relies on parsing error messages.

Describe the solution you'd like
The result of verifyJWT() should be an object with a verified property set to true only when signature, timestamps, and audience are valid, and false otherwise.
When one of the validation criteria fails, the reason can be returned as an error code with a message.
verifyJWT() should not throw errors.

The verification options should accept a now parameter for checks involving past/future validity, or allow the user to disable timestamp checking. Similarly, it should be possible to skip audience checking (although, this is already indirectly possible by pre-inspecting the desired audience).

Describe alternatives you've considered
The desired behavior can already be achieved by calling verifyJWS directly for signature checks and by performing timestamp and audience checking out of band, but that defeats the purpose of having a library to do this.

Another acceptable solution would be to introduce a new method (verifyJWTSafe) that can give detailed reasons for failure without using exceptions for flow control, while leaving the existing verifyJWT method intact for backward compatibility.

Please add your opinion about this subject if you have one.

[uport-automation-bot]

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 6.5.0 🎉

The release is available on:

• npm package (@latest dist-tag)
• GitHub release

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