How to Rotate JWT Signing Keys Without Breaking Every Active Session
Rotate a JWT signing key the naive way, swap it out and redeploy, and every token issued under the old key stops verifying the instant you deploy. Every logged-in user gets kicked out at once. This is one of those problems that's obvious in hindsight and easy to miss the first time you actually need to do it, key rotation isn't something most JWT tutorials cover, because it only becomes a problem well after the initial implementation is working.
Here's how to do it without a mass logout.
Why keys need to rotate at all
Scheduled rotation is basic security hygiene, the same reason you rotate database credentials or API keys periodically, limiting how long any single compromised key stays useful. Emergency rotation is the other case: a key leaked, and you need it dead as fast as possible, which is a different, more urgent version of the same problem.
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