README.md

EscherPHP - HTTP request signing lib

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	The authorization header 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	Could not parse auth header
2003	Invalid {PARAM} query key format
2004	Date header is invalid, the expected format is 20151104T092022Z
3001	Invalid Escher key
3002	Only SHA256 and SHA512 hash algorithms are allowed
3003	The credential scope is invalid
3004	The credential date does not match with the request date
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