Comment by akoboldfrying

Thanks, I can see how invalidating the token after first use, or after a short time period, reduces the exploit possibilities. (If all upstream service providers that you depend on were perfect, this could be arranged separately for each JWT that you need, but they aren't perfect.)

> authenticate it

> the token isn’t useful to an attacker without access to the secret store

If it's not a bearer token (that is, if you need to provide some additional credentials to authenticate it to the secret store) then any such additional authentication would need to be passed in somehow. Are you maybe assuming that in the environment where the app runs, some subsystem will have already installed a credential for some suitable IAM security principal? Because in that case, I certainly agree that it's better to anchor everything off that. That covers many cases (including every cloud) but not, e.g., rented plain VPSes or a couple of servers in your own basement.