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rubycryptographytwitter-oauthsha1

Ruby way to generate a HMAC-SHA1 signature for OAuth


I'm writing a small ruby program to play with Twitter over OAuth and have yet to find a right way to do the HMAC-SHA1 signature. So far, I messed around with

Base64.encode64(OpenSSL::HMAC.hexdigest(digest, key, stuff)).chomp

But this outputs something that Twitter rejects, not being a valid signature. I actually solved it in the worse way possible, please try not to slap me:

php -r "echo rawurlencode(base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', '#{@signature}', '#{llave}', true)));"

This last one actually works and I can go around doing my stuff.

I'd like some tips on how to do actually do this without reverting back to PHP. I'm not much of a fan of libraries while I'm trying to learn a language, so gems are pretty much out of the question.

Thanks!


Solution

  • The following is equivalent to your PHP code, though I chose not to wrap it in a single line.

    I'm using the gem ruby-hmac, because it works with 1.8 as well as Ruby 1.9. If you're exclusively using Ruby 1.9 I believe the standard library package 'digest' has HMAC implemented (but this is missing in the 1.8 version of the package). Make sure to gem install ruby-hmac

    require 'rubygems'
    require 'base64'
    require 'cgi'
    require 'hmac-sha1'
    
    key = '1234'
    signature = 'abcdef'
    hmac = HMAC::SHA1.new(key)
    hmac.update(signature)
    puts CGI.escape(Base64.encode64("#{hmac.digest}\n"))
    
    # equivalent to:
    # php -r "echo rawurlencode(base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', 'abcdef', '1234', true)));"
    

    Better yet, use the standard library package OpenSSL (which most Linux and MacOS have out of the box). This code will work on Ruby 1.8 and 1.9:

    require 'base64'
    require 'cgi'
    require 'openssl'
    
    key = '1234'
    signature = 'abcdef'
    puts CGI.escape(Base64.encode64("#{OpenSSL::HMAC.digest('sha1',key, signature)}\n"))
    
    # equivalent to:
    # php -r "echo rawurlencode(base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', 'abcdef', '1234', true)));"