Best Practices for Integrating Auth0 with a Digital Membership Card Platform

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Hi everyone,

I’m working on a digital card software project and evaluating Auth0 as the authentication and authorization layer across different application stacks.

The platform includes:

  1. A web portal for members
  2. An admin dashboard
  3. Mobile access to digital membership cards
  4. Role-based permissions for staff and members
  5. Secure APIs for validating membership status

One thing I like about Auth0 is that it supports multiple frameworks, so the authentication flow can stay consistent whether the frontend is built with React, Angular, Vue, or Next.js, while the backend runs on Node.js, .NET, Java, or Python.

I’m curious how others handle a few implementation details:

  1. Do you use a single Auth0 tenant for both member and admin applications?
  2. What’s your preferred approach for role-based access control when members have different membership levels?
  3. How do you manage access token refresh for long-lived user sessions without affecting security?
  4. If your platform exposes APIs for mobile apps, do you use separate applications in Auth0 or share the same configuration?

For anyone building a digital membership card software solution, I’d also be interested in hearing how you structure authentication for web, mobile, and API access while keeping the user experience smooth.

3

Hi @adhyan1991

Welcome to the Auth0 Community!

I understand that you would like some implementation details and industry best practices for your question. We are glad to hear that Auth0 represents a viable solution for your use case, when designing the identity architecture for a digital membership platform, finding the right balance between robust security and a frictionless user experience is crucial. Allow me to share some details on each question:

Our recommendation is to use a single tenant per environment (Dev, Staging, Prod) to manage both members and admins, rather than separating them into entirely different tenants. This offers the following benefits:

  • It provides a single “source of truth” database that is easier to manage in terms of administrative overrides, reporting, logs and troubleshooting;
  • Often, admins also have their own digital membership cards. If you separate tenants, an admin would need to maintain two separate accounts (one in the admin tenant, one in the member tenant) and sign in twice. A single tenant allows a user to log in once and access both applications depending on their permissions;
  • It keeps the login portals secure by assigning users to distinct Connections.

This would be a perfect suit for our Role-Based Access Control ( RBAC ) feature which allows you to define fine-grained permissions to each user. It is best to define functional roles such as Staff (who can checkin:member, issue:card) and Member (who can read:own_card) and store the membership level (e.g., "membership_level": "gold") in the user’s app_metadata in Auth0. You can then use a Post-Login Action to append the metadata to the Access/ID token as a custom claim, as in the example below:

   exports.onExecutePostLogin = async (event, api) => {
     const namespace = 'https://my-app.example.com';
     if (event.authorization) {
       api.idToken.setCustomClaim(`${namespace}/roles`, event.authorization.roles);
       api.accessToken.setCustomClaim(`${namespace}/roles`, event.authorization.roles);
     }
   }

I highly recommend our Support Article on how to Add Roles and Permissions to the ID Token Using Actions that further details this matter.

We recommend using Short-Lived Access Tokens (e.g., 15 minutes) paired with Refresh Tokens using Refresh Token Rotation. Your web backend (Next.js/Node.js) is a Confidential Client that can securely hide a client_secret whereas your mobile app (iOS/Android) and Single Page Apps (React/Vue/Angular) are Public Clients. Once there are strict storage requirements are in place to keep them from being leaked, this should offer a great solution - please check our documentation on Understanding Refresh Tokens for more details.

In addition, enabling Automatic Reuse Detection aids in cases of a malicious actor which intercepts a used refresh token and try to replay it, as Auth0 immediately detects the reuse, revokes the entire token family, and forces all active sessions associated with that token chain to log out.

Auth0 provides API Authentication and Authorization as a means to secure access to API endpoints and I highly recommend our Mobile Applications with API documentation for more technical details on how this is approached. In this sense, each Application comes with it’s own set of credentials and it is recommended to always use separate Application Registrations in the Auth0 Dashboard for each client stack for more clarity and control.

Hope I was able to provide some useful information to assist with your integration, please reach out to us for any other issues or requests, we will gladly look into it!

Best regards,
Gerald