Access AWS API Gateway with IAM roles from Python

Question

I have an AWS API Gateway that I would like to secure using IAM Roles .

I am looking for a package to help me accessing it using Python. I am trying to avoid implementing the entire Version 4 Signing Process. I am sure there must be some library I can use.

I looked into aws-requests-auth but it requires a "aws_service" to generate the signature. I looked also to boto3 but I am not able to find any way to just add authentication headers to a general request.

Answer 1

You can use aws-requests-auth to generate the signature for your request to API Gateway with execute-api as the service name.

import requests
from aws_requests_auth.aws_auth import AWSRequestsAuth

auth = AWSRequestsAuth(aws_access_key='YOURKEY',
                       aws_secret_access_key='YOURSECRET',
                       aws_host='restapiid.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com',
                       aws_region='us-east-1',
                       aws_service='execute-api')

headers = {'params': 'ABC'}
response = requests.get('https://restapiid.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/stage/resource_path',
                        auth=auth, headers=headers)

Answer 2

Just to build on Ka Hou Ieong's response, there is one other thing which tripped me up. I was using aws-requests-auth==0.3.0, and in using requests.get(url, auth=auth) I was still getting a 403.

;TLDR;: My URL had a querystring and it looks like aws-requests-auth doesn't or probably cannot make sure the querystring parameters are sorted in ascending order and %-encoded.

==> So once I changed my url querystring to be ordered and %-encoded, I got 200.

Details: I turned on API Gateway logging and I was getting

In [46]: resp = requests.get(url, auth=auth)

In [47]: resp.text
Out[47]: u'{"message":"The request signature we calculated
 does not match the signature you provided. Check your AWS Secret Access Key
 and signing method. Consult the service documentation for details.... 

(the new lines and truncation(...) above is mine)

Per the Amazon Canonical Request for Signature Version 4 documentation,

To construct the canonical query string, complete the following steps:

Sort the parameter names by character code point in ascending order. For example, a parameter name that begins with the uppercase letter F precedes a parameter name that begins with a lowercase letter b.

URI-encode each parameter name and value according to the following rules:

a. Do not URI-encode any of the unreserved characters that RFC 3986 defines: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, hyphen ( - ), underscore ( _ ), period ( . ), and tilde ( ~ ).

b. Percent-encode all other characters with %XY, where X and Y are hexadecimal characters (0-9 and uppercase A-F). For example, the space character must be encoded as %20 (not using '+', as some encoding schemes do) and extended UTF-8 characters must be in the form %XY%ZA%BC.

That canonical querystring is used in generating the Authorization Signature, and AWS applies the same rules when calculating the Signature Version 4 sig. Bottom line, I think of course aws-requests-auth Auth of course cannot change your url, you have to.