Authenticate with a backend server

If you use Google Sign-In with an app or site that communicates with a backend server, you might need to identify the currently signed-in user on the server. To do so securely, after a user successfully signs in, send the user's ID token to your server using HTTPS. Then, on the server, verify the integrity of the ID token and use the user information contained in the token to establish a session or create a new account.

Send the ID token to your server

After a user successfully signs in, get the user's ID token:

function onSignIn(googleUser) {
  var id_token = googleUser.getAuthResponse().id_token;
  ...
}

Then, send the ID token to your server with an HTTPS POST request:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('POST', 'https://yourbackend.example.com/tokensignin');
xhr.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
xhr.onload = function() {
  console.log('Signed in as: ' + xhr.responseText);
};
xhr.send('idtoken=' + id_token);

Verify the integrity of the ID token

After you receive the ID token by HTTPS POST, you must verify the integrity of the token.

To verify that the token is valid, ensure that the following criteria are satisfied:

  • The ID token is properly signed by Google. Use Google's public keys (available in JWK or PEM format) to verify the token's signature. These keys are regularly rotated; examine the Cache-Control header in the response to determine when you should retrieve them again.
  • The value of aud in the ID token is equal to one of your app's client IDs. This check is necessary to prevent ID tokens issued to a malicious app being used to access data about the same user on your app's backend server.
  • The value of iss in the ID token is equal to accounts.google.com or https://accounts.google.com.
  • The expiry time (exp) of the ID token has not passed.
  • If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace or Cloud organization account, you can check the hd claim, which indicates the hosted domain of the user. This must be used when restricting access to a resource to only members of certain domains. The absence of this claim indicates that the account does not belong to a Google hosted domain.

Using the email, email_verified and hd fields, you can determine if Google hosts and is authoritative for an email address. In the cases where Google is authoritative, the user is known to be the legitimate account owner, and you may skip password or other challenge methods.

Cases where Google is authoritative:

  • email has a @gmail.com suffix, this is a Gmail account.
  • email_verified is true and hd is set, this is a G Suite account.

Users may register for Google Accounts without using Gmail or G Suite. When email does not contain a @gmail.com suffix and hd is absent, Google is not authoritative and password or other challenge methods are recommended to verify the user. email_verified can also be true as Google initially verified the user when the Google account was created, however ownership of the third party email account may have since changed.

Rather than writing your own code to perform these verification steps, we strongly recommend using a Google API client library for your platform, or a general-purpose JWT library. For development and debugging, you can call our tokeninfo validation endpoint.

Using a Google API Client Library

Using one of the Google API Client Libraries (e.g. Java, Node.js, PHP, Python) is the recommended way to validate Google ID tokens in a production environment.

Java

To validate an ID token in Java, use the GoogleIdTokenVerifier object. For example:

import com.google.api.client.googleapis.auth.oauth2.GoogleIdToken;
import com.google.api.client.googleapis.auth.oauth2.GoogleIdToken.Payload;
import com.google.api.client.googleapis.auth.oauth2.GoogleIdTokenVerifier;

...

GoogleIdTokenVerifier verifier = new GoogleIdTokenVerifier.Builder(transport, jsonFactory)
    // Specify the WEB_CLIENT_ID of the app that accesses the backend:
    .setAudience(Collections.singletonList(WEB_CLIENT_ID))
    // Or, if multiple clients access the backend:
    //.setAudience(Arrays.asList(WEB_CLIENT_ID_1, WEB_CLIENT_ID_2, WEB_CLIENT_ID_3))
    .build();

// (Receive idTokenString by HTTPS POST)

GoogleIdToken idToken = verifier.verify(idTokenString);
if (idToken != null) {
  Payload payload = idToken.getPayload();

  // Print user identifier
  String userId = payload.getSubject();
  System.out.println("User ID: " + userId);

  // Get profile information from payload
  String email = payload.getEmail();
  boolean emailVerified = Boolean.valueOf(payload.getEmailVerified());
  String name = (String) payload.get("name");
  String pictureUrl = (String) payload.get("picture");
  String locale = (String) payload.get("locale");
  String familyName = (String) payload.get("family_name");
  String givenName = (String) payload.get("given_name");

  // Use or store profile information
  // ...

} else {
  System.out.println("Invalid ID token.");
}

The GoogleIdTokenVerifier.verify() method verifies the JWT signature, the aud claim, the iss claim, and the exp claim.

If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace or Cloud organization account, you can verify the hd claim by checking the domain name returned by the Payload.getHostedDomain() method. The domain of the email claim is insufficient to ensure that the account is managed by a domain or organization.

Node.js

To validate an ID token in Node.js, use the Google Auth Library for Node.js. Install the library: 

npm install google-auth-library --save
 Then, call the verifyIdToken() function. For example:

const {OAuth2Client} = require('google-auth-library');
const client = new OAuth2Client();
async function verify() {
  const ticket = await client.verifyIdToken({
      idToken: token,
      audience: WEB_CLIENT_ID,  // Specify the WEB_CLIENT_ID of the app that accesses the backend
      // Or, if multiple clients access the backend:
      //[WEB_CLIENT_ID_1, WEB_CLIENT_ID_2, WEB_CLIENT_ID_3]
  });
  const payload = ticket.getPayload();
  const userid = payload['sub'];
  // If the request specified a Google Workspace domain:
  // const domain = payload['hd'];
}
verify().catch(console.error);

The verifyIdToken function verifies the JWT signature, the aud claim, the exp claim, and the iss claim.

If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace or Cloud organization account, you can check the hd claim, which indicates the hosted domain of the user. This must be used when restricting access to a resource to only members of certain domains. The absence of this claim indicates that the account does not belong to a Google hosted domain.

PHP

To validate an ID token in PHP, use the Google API Client Library for PHP. Install the library (for example, using Composer): 

composer require google/apiclient
 Then, call the verifyIdToken() function. For example:

require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

// Get $id_token via HTTPS POST.

$client = new Google_Client(['client_id' => $WEB_CLIENT_ID]);  // Specify the WEB_CLIENT_ID of the app that accesses the backend
$payload = $client->verifyIdToken($id_token);
if ($payload) {
  $userid = $payload['sub'];
  // If the request specified a Google Workspace domain
  //$domain = $payload['hd'];
} else {
  // Invalid ID token
}

The verifyIdToken function verifies the JWT signature, the aud claim, the exp claim, and the iss claim.

If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace or Cloud organization account, you can check the hd claim, which indicates the hosted domain of the user. This must be used when restricting access to a resource to only members of certain domains. The absence of this claim indicates that the account does not belong to a Google hosted domain.

Python

To validate an ID token in Python, use the verify_oauth2_token function. For example:

from google.oauth2 import id_token
from google.auth.transport import requests

# (Receive token by HTTPS POST)
# ...

try:
    # Specify the WEB_CLIENT_ID of the app that accesses the backend:
    idinfo = id_token.verify_oauth2_token(token, requests.Request(), WEB_CLIENT_ID)

    # Or, if multiple clients access the backend server:
    # idinfo = id_token.verify_oauth2_token(token, requests.Request())
    # if idinfo['aud'] not in [WEB_CLIENT_ID_1, WEB_CLIENT_ID_2, WEB_CLIENT_ID_3]:
    #     raise ValueError('Could not verify audience.')

    # If the request specified a Google Workspace domain
    # if idinfo['hd'] != DOMAIN_NAME:
    #     raise ValueError('Wrong domain name.')

    # ID token is valid. Get the user's Google Account ID from the decoded token.
    userid = idinfo['sub']
except ValueError:
    # Invalid token
    pass

The verify_oauth2_token function verifies the JWT signature, the aud claim, and the exp claim. You must also verify the hd claim (if applicable) by examining the object that verify_oauth2_token returns. If multiple clients access the backend server, also manually verify the aud claim.

Calling the tokeninfo endpoint

An easy way to validate an ID token signature for debugging is to use the tokeninfo endpoint. Calling this endpoint involves an additional network request that does most of the validation for you while you test proper validation and payload extraction in your own code. It is not suitable for use in production code as requests may be throttled or otherwise subject to intermittent errors.

To validate an ID token using the tokeninfo endpoint, make an HTTPS POST or GET request to the endpoint, and pass your ID token in the id_token parameter. For example, to validate the token "XYZ123", make the following GET request:

https://oauth2.googleapis.com/tokeninfo?id_token=XYZ123

If the token is properly signed and the iss and exp claims have the expected values, you will get a HTTP 200 response, where the body contains the JSON-formatted ID token claims. Here's an example response:

{
 // These six fields are included in all Google ID Tokens.
 "iss": "https://accounts.google.com",
 "sub": "110169484474386276334",
 "azp": "1008719970978-hb24n2dstb40o45d4feuo2ukqmcc6381.apps.googleusercontent.com",
 "aud": "1008719970978-hb24n2dstb40o45d4feuo2ukqmcc6381.apps.googleusercontent.com",
 "iat": "1433978353",
 "exp": "1433981953",

 // These seven fields are only included when the user has granted the "profile" and
 // "email" OAuth scopes to the application.
 "email": "testuser@gmail.com",
 "email_verified": "true",
 "name" : "Test User",
 "picture": "https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-kYgzyAWpZzJ/ABCDEFGHI/AAAJKLMNOP/tIXL9Ir44LE/s99-c/photo.jpg",
 "given_name": "Test",
 "family_name": "User",
 "locale": "en"
}

If you need to validate that the ID token represents a Google Workspace account, you can check the hd claim, which indicates the hosted domain of the user. This must be used when restricting access to a resource to only members of certain domains. The absence of this claim indicates that the account does not belong to a Google Workspace hosted domain.

Create an account or session

After you have verified the token, check if the user is already in your user database. If so, establish an authenticated session for the user. If the user isn't yet in your user database, create a new user record from the information in the ID token payload, and establish a session for the user. You can prompt the user for any additional profile information you require when you detect a newly created user in your app.

Securing your users' accounts with Cross Account Protection

When you rely on Google to sign in a user, you'll automatically benefit from all of the security features and infrastructure Google has built to safeguard the user's data. However, in the unlikely event that the user's Google Account gets compromised or there is some other significant security event, your app can also be vulnerable to attack. To better protect your accounts from any major security events, use Cross Account Protection to receive security alerts from Google. When you receive these events, you gain visibility into important changes to the security of the user's Google account and you can then take action on your service to secure your accounts.