Authentication and getting a session token from Quickblox in Python

Question

I'm doing it through the REST API. Two questions

1) I want to push some existing data to Quickblox custom object. How many REST calls do I need? (I am not really clear about the whole state of affair involving computer security.) Is it first to (a) Get a session token. And then just follow Create new record here?

2) I'm trying to get a session token but I'm getting {"errors":{"base":["Unexpected signature"]}} as response. Here is my code to genereate nonce, signature, and getting session token:

# Of course these are not really 0, x, and y's.
appId = '0000'
authKey = 'XXXXXXXXXXX'
authSecret = 'YYYYYYYYYYYYYY'

def getNonce():
    import random
    return random.random()

def createSignature(nonce):
    import hashlib
    import hmac
    import binascii
    import time
    stringForSignature = 'application_id={id}&auth_key={auth_key}&nonce={nonce}&timestamp={timestamp}'.format(id=appId,
                           auth_key=authKey, nonce=nonce, timestamp=time.time())
    hmacObj = hmac.new(authKey, stringForSignature, hashlib.sha1)
    return binascii.b2a_base64(hmacObj.digest())[:-1] # -1 to get rid of \n

def getSessionToken():
    import time
    epoch = "%s" % int(time.time())
    nonce = getNonce()
    params = {'application_id': appId,
                    'auth_key': authKey,
                   'timestamp': epoch,
                       'nonce': nonce,
                   'signature': createSignature(nonce)}
    jsonData = json.dumps(params)

    httpHeaders = {'Content-Type': 'application/json',
                   'QuickBlox-REST-API-Version': '0.1.0'}

    r = requests.post('https://api.quickblox.com/session.json', data=jsonData, headers = httpHeaders)
    print 'status code:', r.status_code
    responseJson = r.text
    print responseJson
    response = json.loads(responseJson)

getSessionToken()

I suppose it's the way the signature is generated that is causing the problem?

Answer 1

Here is the answer to my question. It turns out that timestamp should be integer only, hamc should use the secret key, and https://api.quickblox.com/auth.json should be used instead of session. And also I didn't use the right encoding for my signature.