emartech/escher

Library for HTTP request signing (PHP implementation)

3.0.0 2021-11-18 12:24 UTC

README

Escher helps you creating secure HTTP requests (for APIs) by signing HTTP(s) requests. It's both a server side and client side implementation. The status is work in progress.

The algorithm is based on Amazon's AWS Signature Version 4, but we have generalized and extended it.

More details will be available at our documentation site.

Signing a request

Escher works by calculating a cryptographic signature of your request, and adding it (and other authentication information) to said request. Usually you will want to add the authentication information to the request by appending extra headers to it. Let's say you want to send a signed POST request to http://example.com/ using the Guzzle\Http library:

<?php

use Escher\Escher;

$method = 'POST';
$url = 'http://example.com';
$requestBody = '{ "this_is": "a_request_body" }';
$yourHeaders = array('Content-Type' => 'application/json');

$headersWithAuthInfo = Escher::create('example/credential/scope')
    ->signRequest('YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'YOUR SECRET', $method, $url, $requestBody, $yourHeaders);

$client = new \GuzzleHttp\Client();
$response = $client->post($url, array(
    'body' => $requestBody,
    'headers' => $headersWithAuthInfo
));

Presigning an URL

In some cases you may want to send authenticated requests from a context where you cannot modify the request headers, e.g. when embedding an API generated iframe. You can however generate a presigned URL, where the authentication information is added to the query string.

<?php

use Escher\Escher;

$presignedUrl = Escher::create('example/credential/scope')
    ->presignUrl('YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'YOUR SECRET', 'http://example.com');

Validating a request

You can validate a request signed by the methods described above. For that you will need a database of the access keys and secrets of your clients. Escher accepts any kind of object as a key database that implements the ArrayAccess interface. (It also accepts plain arrays, however it is not recommended to use a php array for a database of API secrets - it's just there to ease testing)

<?php

use Escher\Escher;
use Escher\Exception;

try {
    $keyDB = new \ArrayObject(array(
        'ACCESS_KEY_OF_CLIENT_1'  => 'SECRET OF CLIENT 1',
        'ACCESS_KEY_OF_CLIENT_42' => 'SECRET OF CLIENT 42',
    ));
    Escher::create('example/credential/scope')->authenticate($keyDB);
} catch (Exception $ex) {
    echo 'The validation failed! ' . $ex->getMessage();
}

Exceptions

Code pattern Exception type
1xxx Missing exceptions
2xxx Invalid format exceptions
3xxx Argument invalid exceptions
4xxx Not signed exceptions
5xxx Expired exception
6xxx Signature exceptions
Code Message
1001 Escher authentication is missing
1100 The {PARAM} header is missing
1101 Query key: {PARAM} is missing
1102 The host header is missing
2001 Date header is invalid, the expected format is Wed, 04 Nov 2015 09:20:22 GMT
2002 Auth header format is invalid
2003 Invalid {PARAM} query key format
2004 Date header is invalid, the expected format is 20151104T092022Z
3001 Invalid Escher key
3002 Hash algorithm is invalid. Only SHA256 and SHA512 are allowed
3003 Credential scope is invalid
3004 Date in the authorization header is invalid. It must be the same as the date header
4001 The host header is not signed
4002 The {PARAM} header is not signed
5001 The request date is not within the accepted time range
6001 The signatures do not match

Configuration

TBA

Running tests

  1. Install packages with Composer: composer install
  2. Run tests with make tests