WSSE Authentication For Atom Using Perl

Atom uses the WSSE authentication for posting and editing weblogs.

Mark Pilgrim explains more about this in layman’s terms in an old XML.com article, Atom Authentication.

This information is passed in an HTTP header, for example…

HTTP_X_WSSE UsernameToken Username="robertprice", PasswordDigest="l7FbmWdq8gBwHgshgQ4NonjrXPA=", Nonce="4djRSlpeyWeGzcNgatneSA==", Created="2005-2-5T17:18:15Z"

We need 4 pieces of information to create this string.

  1. Username
  2. Password
  3. Nonce
  4. Timestamp

A nonce is a cryptographically random string in this case, not the word Clinton Baptiste gets in Phoenix Nights (thanks to Matt Facer for the link). In this case, it’s encoded in base64.

The timestamp is the current time in W3DTF format.

The for items are then encoded together to form a password digest that is used for the verification of the authenticity of the request on the remote atom system. As it already knows you username and password, it can decrypt the password the nonce and timestamp passed in the WSSE header. It uses the well known SHA1 algorithm to encrypt the pasword and encodes it in base64 for transportation across the web.

We can use Perl to create the password digest, as shown in this example code.

my $username = "robertprice";
my $password = "secret password";
my $nonce = "4djRSlpeyWeGzcNgatneSA==";
my $timestamp = "2005-2-5T17:18:15Z";
my $digest = MIME::Base64::encode_base64(Digest::SHA1::sha1($nonce . $timestamp . $password), '');

The password digest is now stored in the variable $digest.

We can also create the HTTP header from this if needed.

print qq{HTTP_X_WSSE UsernameToken Username="$username", PasswordDigest="$digest", Nonce="$nonce", Created="$created"n};

Please note, to use this Perl code, you have to have the MIME::Base64 and Digest::SHA1 modules installed. Both are freely available on CPAN.

Update – 22nd November 2006

Some more recent versions of Atom expect the digest to be generated with a base64 decoded version of the nonce. Using the example above, some example code for this would be…


## generate alternative digest
my $alternative_digest = MIME::Base64::encode_base64(Digest::SHA1::sha1(MIME::Base64::decode_base64($nonce) . $timestamp . $password), '');

When using WSSE for password validation, I now always check the incoming digest with both versions of my generated digested to ensure it’s compatible with different versions of Atom enabled software. One of the best examples of this is the Nokia Lifeblog. Older versions expect the nonce to be left, newer versions expect the nonce to be decoded first.