Laravel: How to fix "the MAC is invalid" on local environment

Question

I'm fairly new to PHP and Laravel. I'm working on a website on my local machine, and testing the admin panel portion of the website. There is a link that allows the administrator to login as a different (non-admin) user directly without having to enter their username or password. This link works fine in production but on my local server, I'm getting the error: Illuminate\Contracts\Encryption\DecryptException: The MAC is invalid. I've gathered that this likely has to do with the middleware or encryption not being set up properly on my local environment, but I don't know how to fix this.

Here is the source code of the link that is not working:

<a href="{{ route('admin_accounts_login_as') }}/{{ $user->user_id }}/" target="_blank" class="btn btn-sm btn-clean btn-icon btn-icon-md" title="Login As User">

And this is the function that is throwing the error:

protected function getJsonPayload($payload)

    {

        $payload = json_decode(base64_decode($payload), true);

 

        // If the payload is not valid JSON or does not have the proper keys set we will

        // assume it is invalid and bail out of the routine since we will not be able

        // to decrypt the given value. We'll also check the MAC for this encryption.

        if (! $this->validPayload($payload)) {

            throw new DecryptException('The payload is invalid.');

        }

 

        if (! $this->validMac($payload)) {

            throw new DecryptException('The MAC is invalid.');

        }

 

        return $payload;

    }

How would I go about setting up this function to work on a local environment?

Thanks

I've tried clicking the link and I expected it to log me in as the desired user. Instead I got the error message shown above. I've tried researching what the error message means, but have not figured out what I need to change to fix it. I've also tried clearing the cache/cookies and running php artisan key:generate but this did not solve the problem.