tai42-webhook-verifier-stripe

The Stripe webhook-signature verifier plugin for the TAI ecosystem — a per-provider WebhookVerifier that authenticates each inbound Stripe delivery before the platform parses or dispatches its payload.

A webhook door can bind a named verifier to a topic; this plugin supplies the stripe verifier.

Stripe signs every webhook delivery with an HMAC-SHA256 over a payload built from the timestamp, a literal ., and the exact raw request body (str(t).encode() + b"." + body), keyed by the endpoint's signing secret. It sends the timestamp and the resulting digest(s) in the Stripe-Signature header as t=<unix ts>,v1=<hex hmac>, with more than one v1= during a secret rotation. StripeWebhookVerifier recomputes that HMAC over the raw bytes and compares each well-formed v1 in constant time; it also rejects a stale timestamp (replay defense). It returns None on success and raises WebhookVerificationError on any failure.

Its only tai-* dependency is tai42-contract (the interface it registers through); the HMAC work is pure standard library (hmac / hashlib, with time for the freshness clock). It never imports the skeleton — the plugin is contract-facing.

The TAI ecosystem

TAI is an open-source runtime for MCP tools, agents, and workflows. A trigger fires a tool from an inbound event; a webhook verifier is the door's bouncer — the per-provider check that authenticates a delivery before any hook runs. This package is the Stripe verifier. The ecosystem is open-ended: any package can supply a verifier, so this repo is this verifier's own full doc home, and the documentation site covers the platform-level story:

• Triggers & webhooks concept: https://tai42.ai/concepts/triggers-and-webhooks
• Build a webhook verifier (author guide): https://tai42.ai/guides/authors/webhook-verifier
• Ecosystem catalog: https://tai42.ai/reference/catalog

The current release line tracks the 7.x contract (tai42-contract>=7,<8).

Install

Requires Python 3.13+. Install from PyPI into the environment that runs the server:

uv add tai42-webhook-verifier-stripe

Or from source — clone this repo and add it as an editable dependency; the tai42-* dependencies resolve in-tree from the workspace.

git clone https://github.com/tai42ai/tai42   # next to your app checkout
cd /path/to/your/app
uv add --editable ../tai42/plugins/webhook-verifier-stripe

How it loads — webhook_verifier_modules

The platform loads this plugin through the manifest's webhook_verifier_modules field — the webhook-verifier kind's own declared binding. The host imports each listed module to run its registration side effect. Importing tai42_webhook_verifier_stripe calls tai42_app.webhook_verifiers.register("stripe", StripeWebhookVerifier()), binding the stripe verifier on the app handle.

{
  // `webhook_verifier_modules` is the webhook-verifier kind's own manifest
  // field: the host imports each listed module purely for its registration
  // side effect, binding the named verifier on the app handle.
  "webhook_verifier_modules": ["tai42_webhook_verifier_stripe"]
}

webhook_verifier_modules is the webhook-verifier kind's own declared field: each entry is imported for its registration side effect, so listing tai42_webhook_verifier_stripe registers the stripe verifier at boot.

Configuration — the secret never leaves the environment

A verifier is bound to a topic with {verifier, config}. This plugin's config holds only the name of the environment variable that carries the signing secret — never the secret itself — plus an optional replay tolerance:

{ "verifier": "stripe", "config": { "secret_env": "STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET" } }

config accepts an optional "tolerance_seconds" (a positive int, default 300 — Stripe's documented replay window):

{ "verifier": "stripe", "config": { "secret_env": "STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET", "tolerance_seconds": 300 } }

At verify time the secret is read from os.environ[config["secret_env"]]. A missing env var raises loudly (KeyError) and an empty one raises ValueError; a non-positive or non-int tolerance_seconds also raises ValueError — verification fails CLOSED, so a misconfigured door never becomes a silently-unauthenticated one.

Secret hygiene. The signing secret lives only in an environment variable. Never commit it to a file, a fixture, a manifest, or a URL. Stripe's endpoint signing secret is shown once in the Dashboard as a whsec_… value; store it in the environment, not in the repository.

End-to-end

1. Create the Stripe webhook endpoint. In the Stripe Dashboard → Developers → Webhooks → Add endpoint, set the endpoint URL to your platform's public door, e.g. https://<your-host>/universal_webhook/stripe-events, and select the events to send. Stripe shows the endpoint's Signing secret (whsec_…) once — store it in the environment as STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET on the platform.

2. List tai42_webhook_verifier_stripe in the manifest under webhook_verifier_modules (see above) so the stripe verifier is registered at boot.

3. Bind the verifier to the topic. Through the skeleton's authenticated route:

   curl -X PUT https://<your-host>/api/hooks/topics/stripe-events/verifier \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $TAI_API_TOKEN" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"verifier": "stripe", "config": {"secret_env": "STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET"}}'
   

4. Register a hook on the stripe-events topic that runs a demo tool (e.g. a tool that logs the event). Now trigger a Stripe event → Stripe signs and POSTs the delivery → the door verifies the Stripe-Signature HMAC and freshness → the hook fires and the tool runs. A delivery with a missing, malformed, stale, or wrong signature is rejected before any hook runs.

Simulate a signed delivery locally

Compute the signature over t.body with the same secret and POST it — this is what a genuine Stripe delivery looks like on the wire:

# The secret lives only in the environment — never hard-coded here.
export STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET="whsec_example_placeholder"   # your endpoint's signing secret

BODY='{"id":"evt_1","type":"checkout.session.completed"}'
TS="$(date +%s)"
SIG="$(printf '%s' "$TS.$BODY" \
  | openssl dgst -sha256 -hmac "$STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET" -r \
  | cut -d ' ' -f1)"

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/universal_webhook/stripe-events \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Stripe-Signature: t=$TS,v1=$SIG" \
  --data-raw "$BODY"

printf '%s' (not echo) sends the body with no trailing newline, so the bytes signed match the bytes POSTed exactly — the HMAC is over timestamp + "." + raw body.

Verification rules

verify(body, headers, config) is an async method — the caller awaits it. It raises WebhookVerificationError when:

• the Stripe-Signature header is missing (lookup is case-insensitive),
• the header is unparsable: no t= element, a duplicate t=, a non-integer t, or no v1= element at all,
• the timestamp is stale (now - t > tolerance_seconds) — a future timestamp is accepted by design, so clock skew on the sender is not treated as an attack,
• no well-formed v1 candidate matches the recomputed digest (the compare uses hmac.compare_digest — constant-time). A malformed v1 (wrong length or non-hex) is skipped, not raised on, so one unusable signature during a secret rotation does not reject a delivery that also carries a good one; a header whose v1 values are all malformed fails here as a plain no-match.

Any non-v1 scheme key (v0=, anything unrecognized) is ignored. A missing secret_env env var raises KeyError, and an empty secret or a non-positive / non-int tolerance_seconds raises ValueError (fails closed), not WebhookVerificationError.

Replay defense. After a delivery passes verification, the verifier claims its Stripe event.id in a seen-set, so a captured signed delivery replayed inside the tolerance window is refused rather than dispatched again. The seen-set TTL runs until the signed freshness window ends (t + tolerance_seconds) — anchored to the signed timestamp and rounded up so an id is never forgotten before that window ends.

Development

uv venv --python 3.13
uv pip install --no-sources --group dev --editable .
uv run --no-sync pytest --cov --cov-report=term-missing
uv run --no-sync ruff check .
uv run --no-sync ruff format --check .
uv run --no-sync pyright

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.