How to protect a direct download link in a Laravel API

I’m new to Laravel and I’m trying to protect some file downloads trough Laravel.

All I’ve read about it is about sending files as “blob” but this solution has issues when I download Blob in my React App: some files stop the download before the entire file is received.

The methode I used

return response()->download($file, 'Test File', $headers, 'inline');

Thanks for the help