flask-hmacauth 0.3.9
A module to simplify working with HMAC auth in Flask apps
License: MIT

Flask-HmacAuth
==============

`|Build Status| <https://travis-ci.org/Phillipmartin/flask-hmacauth>`_ A
module to simplify HMAC-style authentication for RESTful APIs in Flask,
which also builds in a simple RBAC concept and anti-replay via a
timestamp. For GET requests, the path section and all parameters are
hashed. For POST requests, the request body is added as well. By
default, the module expects authentication via an X-Auth-Signature
header and ACCOUNT\_ID and TIMESTAMP parameters (holding the obvious
values) to be present in the query string or request body. TIMESTAMP can
be in any format datetime.fromtimestamp() can parse. ACCOUNT\_ID will be
used to lookup a given account's secret and roles via an AccountBroker.
If auth fails, the application throws a 403 back to the client. All of
that can be changed, however.

The concept of an AccountBroker is used to separate this module from any
actual user/role management logic. 2 trivial AccountBroker
implementations have been provided.

Example
=======

Server
------

::

    from flask import Flask
    from flask.ext.hmacauth import hmac_auth, DictAccountBroker, HmacManager

    app = Flask(__name__)
    accountmgr = DictAccountBroker(
        accounts={
            "admin": {"secret": ";hi^897t7utf", "rights": ["create", "edit", "delete", "view"]},
            "editor": {"secret": "afstr5afewr", "rights": ["create", "edit", "view"]},
            "guest": {"secret": "ASDFjoiu%i", "rights": ["view"]}
        })
    hmacmgr = HmacManager(accountmgr, app)
    ...
    @app.route('/api/v1/create')
    @hmac_auth("create")
    def create_thing():
        ...

Client
------

::

    import requests
    import time
    import hashlib

    path_and_query = "/api/v1/create?TIMESTAMP="+str(int(time.time()))+"&ACCOUNT_ID=admin&foo=bar"
    host = "https://example.com"
    sig=hmac.new(";hi^897t7utf", digestmod=hashlib.sha1, msg=path_and_query).hexdigest()
    req = requests.get(host+path_and_query, headers={'X-Auth-Signature': sig})

AccountBroker
=============

An AccountBroker is an object that intermediates between the HMAC
authentication and your user/account store. It does this by exposing the
following methods:

-  get\_secret(account\_id) - returns a string secret given an account
   ID. If the account does not exist, returns None
-  has\_rights(account\_id, rights) - returns True if account\_id has
   all of the rights in the list rights, otherwise returns False.
   Returns False if the account does not exist.
-  is\_active(account\_id) - returns True if account\_id is active (for
   whatever definition you want to define for active), otherwise returns
   False.

Flask-Hmacauth ships with 2 trivial AccountBroker implementations, a
Dict-based AccountBroker (DictAccountBroker) and a static AccountBroker
(StaticAccountBroker).

DictAccountBroker
-----------------

Takes a dict of format:

::

    {
        "accountID": {
            secret: "blahblah",
            rights: ["right1", "right2", "right3", ...]
        }
        ...
    }

it also exposes the add\_accounts and del\_accounts methods to modify
accounts on the fly.

StaticAccountBroker
-------------------

Essentially disables all of the user and role management, and sets a
static key for use in HMAC. NOTE, if you use this class you need to pass
StaticAccountBroker.GET\_ACCOUNT to HmacManager as the account\_id
parameter OR supply a dummy value for ACCOUNT\_ID in the query string

Write your own
--------------

A very common case for larger applications will be user management via a
database. In that case, your AuthenticationBroker class just needs to
perform the requisite SQL queries to satisfy the the methods above and
you're good to go.

HmacManager
===========

This is the meat of the module. This object contains the is\_authorized
method, which actually does the HMAC verification and role checks.

In the simple case, you just need to pass this object's constructor the
flask application object and an AccountBroker object. In more complex
cases, where you want to change defaults, you have the following
options:

-  app - this is the Flask application container
-  account\_broker - this is the ApplicationBroker object
-  account\_id - this is a callable, which when fed a request object
   will return the request's account ID. The default value for this is
   lambda x: x.values.get('ACCOUNT\_ID')
-  signature - this is a callable, which when fed a request object will
   return the request's signature. The default value for this is
   GET\_SIGNATURE = lambda x: x.headers.get('X-Auth-Signature').
-  timestamp - this is a callable, which when fed a request object will
   return the request's timestamp. The default value for this is lambda
   x: x.values.get('TIMESTAMP')
-  valid\_time - number of seconds that a signed request is valid (based
   on the signed timestamp). defaults to 5
-  digest - digest type, defaults to hashlib.sha1

.. |Build
Status| image:: https://travis-ci.org/Phillipmartin/flask-hmacauth.svg?branch=master