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Inside the Exchange identity token

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Important

Legacy Exchange tokens are deprecated. Starting February 2025, we'll begin to turn off legacy Exchange user identity and callback tokens for Exchange Online tenants. For the timeline and details, see our FAQ page. This is part of Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative, which gives organizations the tools needed to respond to the current threat landscape. Exchange user identity tokens will still work for Exchange on-premises. Nested app authentication is the recommended approach for tokens going forward.

The Exchange user identity token returned by the getUserIdentityTokenAsync method provides a way for your add-in code to include the user's identity with calls to your back-end service. This article will discuss the format and contents of the token.

An Exchange user identity token is a base-64 URL-encoded string that is signed by the Exchange server that sent it. The token is not encrypted, and the public key that you use to validate the signature is stored on the Exchange server that issued the token. The token has three parts: a header, a payload, and a signature. In the token string, the parts are separated by a period character (.) to make it easy for you to split the token.

Exchange uses a the JSON Web Token (JWT) format for the identity token. For information about JWT tokens, see RFC 7519 JSON Web Token (JWT).

Identity token header

The header provides information about the format and signature information of the token. The following example shows what the header of the token looks like.

{
  "typ": "JWT",
  "alg": "RS256",
  "x5t": "Un6V7lYN-rMgaCoFSTO5z707X-4"
}

The following table describes the parts of the token header.
Claim Value Description
typ JWT Identifies the token as a JSON Web Token. All identity tokens provided by Exchange server are JWT tokens.
alg RS256 The hashing algorithm that is used to create the signature. All tokens provided by Exchange server use the RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 with SHA-256 hash algorithm.
x5t Certificate thumbprint The X.509 thumbprint of the token.

Identity token payload

The payload contains the authentication claims that identify the email account and identify the Exchange server that sent the token. The following example shows what the payload section looks like.

{ 
  "aud": "https://mailhost.contoso.com/IdentityTest.html", 
  "iss": "00000002-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000@mailhost.contoso.com", 
  "nbf": "1331579055", 
  "exp": "1331607855", 
  "appctxsender": "00000002-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000@mailhost.context.com",
  "isbrowserhostedapp": "true",
  "appctx": { 
    "msexchuid": "53e925fa-76ba-45e1-be0f-4ef08b59d389@mailhost.contoso.com",
    "version": "ExIdTok.V1",
    "amurl": "https://mailhost.contoso.com:443/autodiscover/metadata/json/1"
  } 
}

The following table lists the parts of the identity token payload.
Claim Description
aud The URL of the add-in that requested the token. A token is only valid if it is sent from the add-in that is running in the client's webview control. The URL of the add-in is specified in the manifest. The markup depends on the type of manifest.

Add-in only manifest: If the add-in uses the Office Add-ins manifests schema v1.1, this URL is the URL specified in the first <SourceLocation> element, under the form type ItemRead or ItemEdit, whichever occurs first as part of the FormSettings element in the add-in manifest.

Unified manifest for Microsoft 365: The URL is specified in the "extensions.audienceClaimUrl" property.
iss A unique identifier for the Exchange server that issued the token. All tokens issued by this Exchange server will have the same identifier.
nbf The date and time that the token is valid starting from. The value is the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.
exp The date and time that the token is valid until. The value is the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.
appctxsender A unique identifier for the Exchange server that sent the application context.
isbrowserhostedapp Indicates whether the add-in is hosted in a browser.
appctx The application context for the token.

The information in the appctx claim provides you with the unique identifier for the account and the location of the public key used to sign the token. The following table lists the parts of the appctx claim.

Application context property Description
msexchuid A unique identifier associated with the email account and the Exchange server.
version The version number of the token. For all tokens provided by Exchange, the value is ExIdTok.V1.
amurl The URL of the authentication metadata document that contains the public key of the X.509 certificate that was used to sign the token.

For more information about how to use the authentication metadata document, see Validate an Exchange identity token.

Identity token signature

The signature is created by hashing the header and payload sections with the algorithm specified in the header and using the self-signed X509 certificate located on the server at the location specified in the payload. Your web service can validate this signature to help make sure that the identity token comes from the server that you expect to send it.

See also

For an example that parses the Exchange user identity token, see Outlook-Add-In-Token-Viewer.