According to the JWT website (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519), JSON Web Tokens are an open, industry standard method for representing claims securely between two parties. JWT allows you to decode, verify, and generate JWT. JWTs can be used easily with Spring Boot to implement authentication in applications. The following sections will demonstrate how to use a JWT and Spring Security combination to secure the messenger backend.

The first thing that must be done in order for you to get started with JWTs in a Spring application is add its dependency to the project pom.xml file:

<dependencies> 
  ...
  <dependency>
    <groupId>io.jsonwebtoken</groupId>
    <artifactId>jjwt</artifactId>
    <version>0.7.0</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Upon including a new maven dependency in pom.xml, IntelliJ will ask you to import the new dependencies:

Click on Import Changes once the prompt shows up, and the JWT dependency will be imported into the project.