python-pae 0.1.0

Pre-authentication encoding (PAE) implementation in Python

Pre-authentication encoding in Python

This minimal library offers an implementation of (a variant of) PASETO’s pre-authentication encoding (PAE) scheme in Python, with some extra tools to handle data types other than lists of byte arrays.

Why use pre-authentication encoding?

When passing around data between services, it’s often necessary to authenticate and validate encoded messages. When those messages are flat byte streams, that’s easy enough. However, when authenticating complex data structures with many fields (some of which may be optional or perhaps exempt from authentication), the input data must first be serialised before it can be passed on to the authentication mechanism. The interchange formats that are commonly used to hold such complex data in transit between web services (e.g. JSON or HTTP query parameters) are poorly suited for this task.

Naively concatenating all inputs before authentication is typically not a good idea, since it can lead to vulnerabilities through length extension attacks or other types of canonicalisation attacks.

Pre-authentication encoding (PAE) can help you protect yourself against a large class of such exploits, by explicitly making the number of data fields and the length of each field part of the data covered by the MAC/signature.

PAE can be used explicitly or implicitly. In the explicit case, PAE serves as both the interchange format and the authentication format. In the implicit case, PAE is used to preprocess data in some other container format before signing/authenticating it, but its output isn’t transmitted directly.

A typical use case would be a signature entry in a JSON object that authenticates one or more of its sibling entries. The signature value would then be computed by applying PAE to the authenticated sibling entries, and passing the result to the signature algorithm.

Requirements

Requires Python 3.7 or later.

Notes

This library has no runtime dependencies, and does not supply any cryptographic operations. Its main purpose is to preprocess complex data structures before authenticating their contents using a MAC or digital signature. The actual authentication mechanism is out of scope, and left to the caller. This library also does not offer any abstractions to handle token expiration, revocation, algorithm selection or anything of the sort.

Stability

Experimental.

Links

• Homepage

• Documentation

• PyPI