Security
Public key cryptography and supported signature schemes over HTTP and JSON-LD.
HTTP Signatures
app/lib/request.rbHTTP Signatures is a specification for signing HTTP messages by using a Signature:
header with your HTTP request. Mastodon requires the use of HTTP Signatures in order to validate that any activity received was authored by the actor generating it. When secure mode is enabled, all GET requests require HTTP signatures as well.
For any HTTP request incoming to Mastodon, the Signature header should be attached:
Signature: keyId="https://my-example.com/actor#main-key",headers="(request-target) host date",signature="Y2FiYW...IxNGRiZDk4ZA=="
The three parts of the Signature:
header can be broken down like so:
Signature:
keyId="https://my-example.com/actor#main-key",
headers="(request-target) host date",
signature="Y2FiYW...IxNGRiZDk4ZA=="
The keyId
should correspond to the actor and the key being used to generate the signature
, whose value is equal to all parameters in headers
concatenated together and signed by the key, then Base64-encoded. See ActivityPub > Public key for more information on actor keys. An example key looks like this:
"publicKey": {
"id": "https://my-example.com/actor#main-key",
"owner": "https://my-example.com/actor",
"publicKeyPem": "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\nMIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAvXc4vkECU2/CeuSo1wtn\nFoim94Ne1jBMYxTZ9wm2YTdJq1oiZKif06I2fOqDzY/4q/S9uccrE9Bkajv1dnkO\nVm31QjWlhVpSKynVxEWjVBO5Ienue8gND0xvHIuXf87o61poqjEoepvsQFElA5ym\novljWGSA/jpj7ozygUZhCXtaS2W5AD5tnBQUpcO0lhItYPYTjnmzcc4y2NbJV8hz\n2s2G8qKv8fyimE23gY1XrPJg+cRF+g4PqFXujjlJ7MihD9oqtLGxbu7o1cifTn3x\nBfIdPythWu5b4cujNsB3m3awJjVmx+MHQ9SugkSIYXV0Ina77cTNS0M2PYiH1PFR\nTwIDAQAB\n-----END PUBLIC KEY-----\n"
},
See also: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-and-verify-requests/
Creating HTTP signatures
To create an HTTP signature, you will have to define which headers are being hashed and signed. For example, consider the following GET request:
GET /users/username/outbox HTTP/1.1
Host: mastodon.example
Date: 18 Dec 2019 10:08:46 GMT
Accept: application/ld+json; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
The signature string is constructed using the values of the HTTP headers defined in headers
, joined by newlines. Typically, you will want to include the request target, as well as the host and the date. Mastodon assumes Date:
header if none are provided. For the above GET request, to generate a Signature:
with headers="(request-target) host date"
we would generate the following string:
(request-target): get /users/username/outbox
host: mastodon.example
date: 18 Dec 2019 10:08:46 GMT
Note that we don’t care about the Accept:
header because we won’t be specifying it in headers
.
The signature string is then hashed with RSA-SHA256 (RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 with SHA-256) and signed with the actor’s private key. The resulting value is attached as signature
within the Signature:
header. The final request looks like this:
GET /users/username/inbox HTTP/1.1
Host: mastodon.example
Date: 18 Dec 2019 10:08:46 GMT
Accept: application/ld+json; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
Signature: keyId="https://my-example.com/actor#main-key",headers="(request-target) host date",signature="Y2FiYW...IxNGRiZDk4ZA=="
This request is functionally equivalent to saying that https://my-example.com/actor
is requesting https://mastodon.example/users/username/inbox
and is proving that they sent this request by signing (request-target)
, Host:
, and Date:
with their private key linked at keyId
, resulting in the provided signature
.
Signing POST requests and the Digest header
When making a POST request to Mastodon, you must calculate the RSA-SHA256 digest hash of your request’s body and include this hash within the Digest:
header. The Digest:
header must also be included within the headers
parameter of the Signature:
header. For example:
POST /users/username/inbox HTTP/1.1
HOST: mastodon.example
Date: 18 Dec 2019 10:08:46 GMT
Digest: e37e179c75071a291f90a5fd4f848da87b491f1282f7bb8509ef2115b81ee0f4
Signature: keyId="https://my-example.com/actor#main-key",headers="(request-target) host date digest",signature="Y2FiYW...IxNGRiZDk4ZA=="
Content-Type: application/ld+json; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"actor": "https://example.com/actor",
"type": "Create",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"content": "Hello!"
}
"to": "https://mastodon.example/users/username"
}
Verifying HTTP signatures
app/controllers/concerns/signature_verification.rbConsider the following request:
POST /users/username/inbox HTTP/1.1
Host: mastodon.example
Date: 18 Dec 2019 10:08:46 GMT
Digest: e37e179c75071a291f90a5fd4f848da87b491f1282f7bb8509ef2115b81ee0f4
Signature: keyId="https://my-example.com/actor#main-key",headers="(request-target) host date digest",signature="Y2FiYW...IxNGRiZDk4ZA=="
Content-Type: application/ld+json; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"actor": "https://example.com/actor",
"type": "Create",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"content": "Hello!"
}
"to": "https://mastodon.example/users/username"
}
Mastodon verifies the signature using the following algorithm:
- Split
Signature:
into its separate parameters. - Construct the signature string from the value of
headers
. - Fetch the
keyId
and resolve to an actor’spublicKey
. - RSA-SHA256 hash the signature string and compare to the Base64-decoded
signature
as decrypted bypublicKey[publicKeyPem]
. - Use the
Date:
header to check that the signed request was made within the past 12 hours.
Linked Data Signatures
app/lib/activitypub/linked_data_signature.rb@context
between the drafting stage and finalization stage of the specification. Mastodon expects a type
of RsaSignature2017
while later drafts instead define RsaSignature2018
via the namespace https://w3id.org/security/v2
. Furthermore, the LD Signatures specification as a whole has been superseded by the Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0 specification, which is largely incompatible with the earlier LD Signature spec. For this reason, it is not advised to implement support for LD Signatures.Linked Data Signatures 1.0 was a draft specification for attaching cryptographic signatures to JSON-LD documents. LD Signatures are not used widely within Mastodon, but they are used in the following situations:
- When running a self-destruct sequence to send Delete activities to all known peers, the payload will use LD Signatures because HTTP Signatures will not be available. Receiving servers will process the signature by validating it against the locally cached actor key, since the HTTP server will no longer be hosting old actor information.
- When accepting activities from a relay. Public activities can optionally be sent to a relay with LD Signatures, and any server subscribing to a relay does not have to manually refetch the activity from the origin. This prevents having potentially infinite servers attempt to load the status from your instance.
Creating LD signatures
To create a signature, Mastodon uses the keypair attached to an actor at https://mastodon.example/users/username#main-key
. It then creates an RSA-SHA256 hash of the document, signs it with the keypair, and Base64-strict-encodes the resulting output to derive a signatureValue
. The following hash is merged into the JSON-LD document:
"signature": {
"type": "RsaSignature2017",
"creator": "https://mastodon.example/users/username#main-key",
"created": "2019-12-08T03:48:33.901Z",
"signatureValue": "s69F3mfddd99dGjmvjdjjs81e12jn121Gkm1"
}
Verifying LD signatures
To verify a signature, Mastodon uses the following algorithm:
- Make sure that a
signature
exists and is a hash. - Make sure that
signature[type]
isRsaSignature2017
. - Fetch the
signature[creator]
URI. Make sure the creator exists. - Strip
type
,id
, andsignatureValue
from thesignature
, leaving onlysignature[creator]
andsignature[created]
. - Base64-decode the
signatureValue
and verify it against the public key insignature[creator]
.
Last updated March 8, 2023 路 Improve this page