A Banking Analogy — Smashing Magazine

There is a strange ritual that web developers around the world have been perpetuating from the dawn of computers to modern days. Without this ritual, the web application cannot really exist. It is not “ready to go live,” a web developer would say. This ritual is the implementation of authentication.

You may have been through this ritual multiple times. But do you really understand what is happening?

This article is my attempt at making this ritual less obscure. It shouldn’t have to take a wizard to implement a good authentication system. Just a good banker!

Your Password Matched. Now What?

Authentication is the process of attributing a given request to a unique entity, usually a person. It then enables authorization, the process of allowing (or not) said person to access a resource, be it a web page or an API endpoint.

I will focus on the part I’ve always found the most difficult to understand: what happens after the user just submitted the login form and their credentials were confirmed as valid by the backend.

app.post("/login", async...