Generate Bulk Session Tokens
Seeding a development or staging environment with realistic session data is tedious if you generate tokens one at a time. This example generates five base64url session tokens at once, each 64 characters long with 256 bits of entropy. The quantity is set to 5 to demonstrate batch generation, but you can increase it for larger seeding tasks.
How to Use
- The charset is pre-set to Base64url
- Length is 64 characters for 256 bits of security
- Quantity is set to 5 tokens
- Click Generate
- Copy each token individually or use Copy All
Session Token Best Practices
Generation
Every session token must come from a cryptographically secure random number generator. The Random String Generator uses the Web Crypto API, which in the browser maps to system-level entropy sources. Do not use Math.random() or any PRNG for session tokens. The difference between a secure random token and a PRNG-generated token is the difference between infeasible guessing and a known attack vector.
Storage and Validation
Never store session tokens in plain text. Hash them with SHA-256 before inserting into the database, and validate the hash against user-supplied tokens on each request. This means a database breach does not expose active sessions. The hashing overhead per request is negligible compared to the security benefit.
Rotation
Generate session tokens with an expiry date and rotate them periodically. Short-lived sessions (15-60 minutes) with refresh tokens provide a good balance between security and user experience. For development environments, longer expiry is acceptable because the stakes are lower and the convenience of not re-authenticating every few minutes matters more for productivity.