How to Build a Secure Password Reset Flow: Tokens, States, and Session Revocation
A secure password recovery system should return identical responses for both known and unknown email addresses to prevent account enumeration, a practice recommended by OWASP. The reset flow relies on a single-use, short-lived token that is hashed before storage and consumed in one atomic transaction upon use. A five-state model — requested, delivered, confirmed, completed, and expired — keeps the process auditable and makes retry handling predictable. Once a password change is confirmed, all active sessions for that account are immediately revoked to prevent unauthorized access. For teams migrating away from managed auth providers, the article recommends keeping this state machine in the application database behind replaceable repository and mailer interfaces.
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