STstytch
Password

Authenticate

Changed on

Authenticate a user with their email address and password. This endpoint verifies that the user has a password currently set, and that the entered password is correct. There are two instances where the endpoint will return a reset_password error even if they enter their previous password:

One: The user's credentials appeared in the HaveIBeenPwned dataset. We force a password reset to ensure that the user is the legitimate owner of the email address, and not a malicious actor abusing the compromised credentials.

Two: A user that has previously authenticated with email/password uses a passwordless authentication method tied to the same email address (e.g. Magic Links, Google OAuth) for the first time. Any subsequent email/password authentication attempt will result in this error. We force a password reset in this instance in order to safely deduplicate the account by email address, without introducing the risk of a pre-hijack account takeover attack.

Imagine a bad actor creates many accounts using passwords and the known email addresses of their victims. If a victim comes to the site and logs in for the first time with an email-based passwordless authentication method then both the victim and the bad actor have credentials to access to the same account. To prevent this, any further email/password login attempts first require a password reset which can only be accomplished by someone with access to the underlying email address.

post/v1/passwords/authenticate

Request

  • Base URL
    https://api.stytch.com
  • Auth
    HTTP basic

Request body

emailstring required

The email address of the end user.

passwordstring required

The password for the user. Any UTF8 character is allowed, e.g. spaces, emojis, non-English characters, etc.

session_tokenstring

The session_token associated with a User's existing Session.

session_duration_minutesinteger

Set the session lifetime to be this many minutes from now. This will start a new session if one doesn't already exist, returning both an opaque session_token and session_jwt for this session. Remember that the session_jwt will have a fixed lifetime of five minutes regardless of the underlying session duration, and will need to be refreshed over time.

This value must be a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 527040 minutes (366 days).

If a session_token or session_jwt is provided then a successful authentication will continue to extend the session this many minutes.

If the session_duration_minutes parameter is not specified, a Stytch session will not be created.

session_jwtstring

The session_jwt associated with a User's existing Session.

session_custom_claimsobject

Add a custom claims map to the Session being authenticated. Claims are only created if a Session is initialized by providing a value in session_duration_minutes. Claims will be included on the Session object and in the JWT. To update a key in an existing Session, supply a new value. To delete a key, supply a null value.

Custom claims made with reserved claims ("iss", "sub", "aud", "exp", "nbf", "iat", "jti") will be ignored. Total custom claims size cannot exceed four kilobytes.

telemetry_idstring

If the telemetry_id is passed, as part of this request, Stytch will call the Fingerprint Lookup API and store the associated fingerprints and IPGEO information for the User. Your workspace must be enabled for Device Fingerprinting to use this feature.

Response

Successful response

request_idstring required

Globally unique UUID that is returned with every API call. This value is important to log for debugging purposes; we may ask for this value to help identify a specific API call when helping you debug an issue.

user_idstring required

The unique ID of the affected User.

session_tokenstring required

A secret token for a given Stytch Session.

session_jwtstring required

The JSON Web Token (JWT) for a given Stytch Session.

status_codeinteger required

The HTTP status code of the response. Stytch follows standard HTTP response status code patterns, e.g. 2XX values equate to success, 3XX values are redirects, 4XX are client errors, and 5XX are server errors.

Changes