NIST Issues New Guidance to Protect SSO and API Tokens From Theft and Forgery
NIST released IR 8587 giving agencies and cloud providers recommendations to prevent identity token forgery, theft, and misuse in SSO and API environments.
NIST Internal Report 8587, released September 15, 2026, provides implementation recommendations covering token creation, signing, validation, storage, revocation, and lifecycle management for SAML, OpenID Connect, and OAuth 2.0 environments. It builds on SP 800-53 Rev. 5.1.1 and incorporates lessons from breaches involving stolen signing keys, abused OAuth applications, and replayed federated assertions. Recommendations include strong signing algorithms, strict claim validation, short token lifetimes, token binding, leakage prevention, and monitoring for abnormal token use.
- Covers identity tokens, access tokens, and federated assertions across SAML, OIDC, and OAuth 2.0.
- Urges treating tokens as high-value credentials equivalent to authenticated sessions.
- Recommends key rotation, strict claim validation, token binding, and leakage prevention.
- Advises continuous monitoring for impossible travel and suspicious token reuse patterns.
- Promotes secure-by-design defaults from cloud service providers.
From the original article
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published new implementation guidance to safeguard identity tokens, access tokens, and assertions used in single sign-on, cloud federation, and application programming interface (API) environments.
By Divya · gbhackers.com
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