JwtBearerAuthentication doesnt return 403 Forbidden, always returns 401 Unauthorized - asp.net-core

Question

If ClaimsIdentity set through JwtBearerAuthentication middleware doesnt have enough roles required through
[Authorize(Roles="whateverrole")]
it returns 401 instead of 403.
I am struggling with this in asp.net core web api whole night. I have also seen this question on stackoverflow but i havent seen any solution i could make work. The order of registering middleware nor AutomaticChallange setting did the job.
I dont know if i am missing something but it seems shocking that this hasn't been solved properly for years. It is so annoying.
Is there any normal, usual, non-workaround, non-hack way of solving this?
UPDATE (in response to comment from #juunas)
I have tried that and roles are mapped correctly from Claims.
So, if i remove Roles requirement from attribute, for all roles that user is assigned to (in JWT token) User.IsInRole(x) returns true. So mapping works just fine.
About moving from roles based authorization to policies...can you provide some some link with some best practices, recommendations or something that you base that statement on?
I am not saying its not something to be done but would just like to understand it.

Answer 1

It's important to understand the difference in these to errors to understand why you will get one and not the other.
401 is for authentication. If you are getting this error then you have to ask yourself is the user logged in, or does the user have a current token provided by a valid token provider? If the token has expired or the provider is not valid then you can get a 401. If this is what you are getting then you need to check User.Identity.IsAuthenticated does this return true? Most likely it returns false.
403 is for authorization. This would mean the user has a valid token, but the token they have does not give them access to the resource they are requesting. This is where you would want to check User.IsInRole() and it would return false.
If you're getting 401 it means that the user hasn't been authenticated i.e. they have not logged in, their login was invalid, the token has expired... etc. As far as your application is concerned the user hasn't proved they are who they say they are yet.
Edit: Apologies for assuming the user wasn't Authenicated, I didn't see where you stated that they where in your first post. It's hard to help without seeing code but my next guess is that the Claims check hasn't been added to the services pipeline.
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
services.AddMvc();
services.AddAuthorization(options =>
{
options.AddPolicy("whateverrole", policy => policy.RequireClaim("whateverrole"));
});
}
This is in your Startup.cs. MS doc is here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authorization/claims
Last update: Simply put using the default Authorize attribute tag you can't change it. MS designs I this way due to the number of layers in the pipeline that could impact authentication. I was unaware of this because I use a custom Authorize attribute and forgot that I over wrote the way it handled status codes.
However I found a nice solution that might suite your needs https://github.com/aspnet/Security/issues/872#issuecomment-232624106
It adds an error page to the pipeline prior to the app.UseMvc() that redirects authentication errors to an error page that returns the correct status code.