In most cases, trust boundaries are violated when a secret is exposed in a source code repository or an uncontrolled deployment environment.
Unintended people who don’t need to know the secret might get access to it. They might then be able to use it to gain unwanted access to associated
services or resources.
The trust issue can be more or less severe depending on the people’s role and entitlement.
What is the potential impact?
If a JWT secret key leaks to an unintended audience, it can have serious security implications for the corresponding application. The secret key is
used to encode and decode JWTs when using a symmetric signing algorithm, and an attacker could potentially use it to perform malicious actions.
For example, an attacker could use the secret key to create their own authentication tokens that appear to be legitimate, allowing them to bypass
authentication and gain access to sensitive data or functionality.
In the worst-case scenario, an attacker could be able to execute arbitrary code on the application by abusing administrative features, and take
over its hosting server.
