pysigned 0.2.4

Sign and verify URLs with an expiry, using HMAC or Ed25519

pysigned

Sign and verify URLs with an expiry. pysigned appends a tamper-proof signature (sig) and an expiry (exp) to a URL's query string, so you can hand out time-limited links — download links, password resets, webhook callbacks — that can't be altered without invalidating the signature.

📖 Documentation

• Two backends. HMAC (symmetric) by default, or Ed25519 (asymmetric) when the signer and verifier shouldn't share a secret.
• Key rotation. Configure several keys; signing uses one, verification accepts any of them, so you can roll keys without breaking links in flight.
• Canonical signing. The query string is normalised before signing, so the signature survives re-encoding and reordering of unrelated parameters.

Installation

Requires Python 3.11+.

uv add pysigned

pip install pysigned

Usage

HMAC (symmetric)

The same secret signs and verifies. Use this when a single trusted service does both. Keys must be at least 64 bytes (the SHA-512 digest size).

import secrets
from pysigned import URLAuth

# A raw 64-byte secret is wrapped in an HMAC keyset automatically.
signer = URLAuth([secrets.token_bytes(64)], ttl=60)

signed = signer.sign("https://example.com/report?id=42&fmt=pdf")
# https://example.com/report?id=42&fmt=pdf&sig=...&exp=...

signer.verify(signed)                             # True
signer.verify(signed.replace("id=42", "id=99"))   # False — tampered

ttl is the number of seconds a signature stays valid (default: 10 minutes). Once exp passes, verify returns False.

Key rotation

Pass (key_bytes, id) tuples to give keys stable ids. The most recently added key signs by default; every configured key is accepted on verify, so signatures made with a rotated-out key keep working until they expire.

import secrets
from pysigned import KeySet, URLAuth

keys = KeySet([
    (secrets.token_bytes(64), "k-2024"),  # old key, still trusted for verify
    (secrets.token_bytes(64), "k-2025"),  # newest -> used for signing
])
signer = URLAuth(keys, ttl=60)

# Sign with a specific key instead of the default:
signer = URLAuth(keys, signing_key_id="k-2024")

Ed25519 (asymmetric)

A keypair signs; a public key only verifies. Use this when you sign in one place and verify somewhere less trusted — the verifier holds only the public key and can't forge new signatures.

from pysigned import Ed25519KeyPair, KeySet, URLAuth

# Signing side holds the keypair (private key plus its public key).
keypair = Ed25519KeyPair.generate("ed-2025")
signer = URLAuth(KeySet([keypair]), ttl=60)
signed = signer.sign("https://example.com/download?file=archive.zip")

# Verifying side only needs the public key. It shares the keypair's id.
public = keypair.public()
verifier = URLAuth(KeySet([public]))

verifier.verify(signed)  # True

Mixing algorithms

A single KeySet can hold both HMAC and Ed25519 keys. verify() accepts any of them, so an audience can migrate from one algorithm to another without a flag-day cutover — keep verifying old HMAC signatures while signing new ones with Ed25519.

from pysigned import Ed25519KeyPair, KeySet, URLAuth

keys = KeySet([
    (secrets.token_bytes(64), "legacy-hmac"),  # still trusted for verify
    Ed25519KeyPair.generate("ed-2025"),        # new signatures use this
])
signer = URLAuth(keys, signing_key_id="ed-2025")

Ignoring query parameters

Parameters you don't want to be part of the signature (for example a tracking token added downstream) can be excluded:

signer = URLAuth(keys, ignore_query_params=["utm_source"])

Clock skew

Allow a grace period past expiry to tolerate clock differences between signer and verifier:

signer.verify(signed, skew=30)  # accept up to 30s past exp

Generating keys

The pysigned-gen-key command, installed alongside the package, prints a freshly generated key as JSON:

pysigned-gen-key --hmac
pysigned-gen-key --ed25519 --jwks   # wrap in a JWKS for KeySet.from_jwks

Loading keys from the environment

KeySet.from_env reads a JWKS (as produced by pysigned-gen-key --jwks) from an environment variable, so secrets never touch disk as plain key bytes:

export APP_SIGNING_KEYS="$(pysigned-gen-key --ed25519 --jwks)"

from pysigned import KeySet, URLAuth

keys = KeySet.from_env("APP_SIGNING_KEYS")
signer = URLAuth(keys, ttl=60)

It raises ValueError if the variable is unset or empty.

Examples

A runnable demo of both backends lives in examples/sign_urls.py:

uv run python examples/sign_urls.py

FastAPI extension

pysigned[fastapi] adds SignedRoute, a FastAPI dependency that verifies a request's URL signature and raises 403 Forbidden on failure:

uv add "pysigned[fastapi]"

from fastapi import Depends, FastAPI
from pysigned import KeySet
from pysigned.extensions.fastapi import SignedRoute

keys = KeySet.from_env("APP_SIGNING_KEYS")
verify_signature = SignedRoute(keyset=keys)

app = FastAPI()


@app.get("/download", dependencies=[Depends(verify_signature)])
def download():
    ...

If the keys aren't known until request time — e.g. looking them up per tenant — pass keyset_getter instead of keyset:

async def keys_for_request(request) -> KeySet:
    tenant = request.headers["x-tenant-id"]
    return await load_keys_for_tenant(tenant)


verify_signature = SignedRoute(keyset_getter=keys_for_request)

signing_key_id, ignore_query_params, and ttl are forwarded to the underlying URLAuth; error_status overrides the status code raised on a failed verification (default: 403).

How it works

URLAuth.sign builds a canonical byte string from the URL's scheme, host, path, and query (with sig/exp and any ignored params removed), appends the expiry, and signs it with the configured backend. Components are joined with newlines — a byte that can't appear in a URL component — so field boundaries can never be confused. verify rebuilds the same message and checks the signature against every configured key in constant time.