Request Signature Authentication for IVRs Built with Python

Time to read: 6 minutes

September 07, 2017
Written by
Patrick Yevsukov
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

Python and Pyramid IVR

For many APIs it is desirable to authenticate requests made to an endpoint. For an interactive voice response (IVR) system API which returns TwiML, the only entity that should likely be allowed access in production is Twilio. This post will cover implementation of request signature validation in a Python IVR web application that uses the Pyramid web framework.

Allowing Twilio Access To localhost

Of the many ways to create a public URL to serve TwiML to Twilio, ngrok is one of the simplest. ngrok will be used for this tutorial and is available here. Once ngrok is downloaded and unzipped, the following command should be run from the directory where it is located:

./ngrok http 0.0.0.0:8080

When the above command is run in the terminal this output should appear:

ngrok terminal output

For this demo the HTTPS link will be used. Copy it, and we’ll paste it in the next section.

Setting Up The Twilio Account

To follow along with this demo a Twilio account is required, as the auth token associated with the account is an integral part of request validation. A Twilio account may be created here.
Once logged into a Twilio account, navigate to the phone numbers section and select the phone number that will be used for this demo. Then set the incoming webhook on its configuration page like so and ensure the trailing slash is included:

Twilio phone numbers

The “Common Stumbling Blocks” section below explains the trailing slash inclusion.
Proceed to the console dashboard to obtain the account’s auth token, which is circled below.

Twilio console dashboard

Setting Up And Serving The Demo App

Now it’s time to setup and serve the demo app with the following commands:

cd /tmp
curl -LOk https://github.com/patrickyevsukov/twilio_demo_pyramid_auth/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
mv twilio_demo_pyramid_auth* twilio_demo_pyramid_auth
cd twilio_demo_pyramid_auth
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv --clear venv
. ./venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
export TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=XXXX
./tools/serve -c examples/config.ini

Note that the use of a TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable is to prevent inclusion of this sensitive information in a config file or source code, where it may be accidentally version controlled. In production systems, a more robust solution for safely including the auth token in a Twilio app may be desirable.

The app should now be available to Twilio and calling the phone number configured in the previous section should result in the following output in the terminal serving the Pyramid app:

1970-01-01 00:00:00,001 INFO  [twilio_demo_pyramid_auth.security] Authenticating GET /
1970-01-01 00:00:00,002 INFO  [twilio_demo_pyramid_auth.security] Authentication SUCCESS
1970-01-01 00:00:00,003 INFO  [twilio_demo_pyramid_auth.security] Authenticating POST /
1970-01-01 00:00:00,004 INFO  [twilio_demo_pyramid_auth.security] Authentication SUCCESS
1970-01-01 00:00:00,005 INFO  [twilio_demo_pyramid_auth.security] Authenticating GET /accessible
1970-01-01 00:00:00,006 INFO  [twilio_demo_pyramid_auth.security] Authentication SUCCESS

For additional information on building applications in Python with the Twilio Voice API, see the quickstart documentation.

How To Spot A Fake Request

Seems legit meme

When the webhook configured to handle incoming phone calls receives a request from Twilio, the request header will contain an X-Twilio-Signature. This value, along with the account’s auth token is all that is necessary to determine if a request actually originated from Twilio.
Note: The process by which Twilio generates this header value is delineated here.
In determining if a request to a certain endpoint should be allowed, Pyramid takes two concepts into account: authentication and authorization. Authentication may be thought of as checking if the requester is who they claim to be, and authorization may be thought of as checking if the requester has permission to do what they are attempting.
Verifying request signatures is an authentication concern and should be handled via the Pyramid app’s authentication policy. Pyramid includes no authentication policies which cleanly allow for only validation of Twilio request signatures. They all center around a userid and facilitate the creation and usage of sessions. Pyramid’s AuthTktCookieHelper comes close to a good fit, but it provides a lot of extra functionality that is not necessary for simple, stateless request validation.
Thankfully, Pyramid makes it easy to define and include a custom authentication policy. A canonical authentication policy should implement the IAuthenticationPolicy interface and define all of its methods; however, doing so will result in a far more fully featured policy than is necessary for this demo.
Note: Twilio also supports HTTP basic authentication and Pyramid includes a BasicAuthAuthenticationPolicy out-of-the-box. This tutorial focuses only on digest authentication which may be preferable as it does not require the inclusion of credentials in every request URL where they may be susceptible to interception.
The custom TwilioSignatureAuthenticationPolicy defined for this demo contains an effective_principals method definition. This is the only method Pyramid requires for an authentication policy to be compatible with the ACLAuthorizationPolicy.
A Pyramid app will call the authentication policy’s effective_principals method for each HTTP request to one of its endpoints, making this a convenient location to include the Twilio RequestValidator. 
class TwilioSignatureAuthenticationPolicy(object):

    def _is_authentic_twilio_request(self, request):
        logger.info("Authenticating {} {}".format(request.method, request.path))

        twilio_auth_key = os.environ["TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN"]
        request_validator = RequestValidator(twilio_auth_key)

        twilio_signature = request.headers.get("X-Twilio-Signature", "")
        is_authentic = request_validator.validate(
            request.url,
            request.POST,
            twilio_signature,
        )
        if is_authentic:
            logger.info("Authentication SUCCESS")
            return is_authentic

        logger.info("Authentication FAILURE")
        return is_authentic

    def effective_principals(self, request):
        principals = [pyramid_security.Everyone]

        if self._is_authentic_twilio_request(request):
            principals.append(Twilio)

        return principals

The access control list of the root context defined for this demo app’s views only allows the "view" permission to the Twilio security group:

class RootContext(object):

    __name__ = ""
    __parent__ = None

    def __init__(self, request):
        pass

    @property
    def __acl__(self):
        return (
            (Allow, Twilio, "view"),
        )

If the signature generated by the RequestValidator does not match the X-Twilio-Signature attached to the request, then the authentication policy will not include the Twilio principal in its list of effective principals and the requester will be denied access to any endpoint requiring “view” permission.

You shall not pass Gandalf meme

Common Stumbling Blocks

The URL passed to the RequestValidator.validate method must be identical to the one used by Twilio. Concerns such as trailing slashes and request URI schemes – either http or https in the case of Twilio – must be taken into account.
By default, the Pyramid request.url method will generate a URL ending in a trailing slash for the root URL whereas ngrok displays the root URL without one:

ngrok terminal output
Copying and pasting this ngrok URL, exactly as it appears will result in request validation failure, so ensure a trailing slash is appended when configuring the call handler webhook:
Twilio phone numbers

If the Pyramid application that has been configured to serve as the call handler sits behind a load balancer, or any service which terminates TLS, it is critical that these lines appear in the app’s configuration file. Failure to include them will result in calls to Pyramid’s various URL generation methods returning URLs with the incorrect scheme (i.e. http://ivr.example.com instead of https://ivr.example.com). 
app:main]
use = egg:twilio_demo_pyramid_auth
filter-with = prefix

pyramid.includes = pyramid_exclog

support_number = 000-000-0000

# The below filter config will ensure that the `X-Forwarded-Proto` header
# is respected when pyramid generates URLs. This is critical if your application
# sits behind an ELB which terminates TLS.
#
# docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/waitress/en/latest/#using-paste-s-prefixmiddleware-to-set-wsgi-url-scheme
#
[filter:prefix]
use = egg:PasteDeploy#prefix

Another point to remember for GET requests is that Twilio passes various query string parameters when hitting the webhook; however, for POST requests this information resides in the request body. This may be a stumbling block for Pyramid users, as the widely used request.params property merges the query string params with the request body for convenience. Ensure that for validation purposes, the request.POST property is used instead. This property will return an empty dictionary-like object on GET requests, avoiding interference with validation. Below is the behavior of request.POST during a HTTP GET:

>>>> request.POST

>>>> type(request.POST)
<class 'webob.multidict.NoVars'>
>>>> dict(request.POST)
{}

Error Handling

In the event that a problem arises with the API attempting to serve TwiML either due to request validation failure or some other reason, Twilio will read a stock error message to the caller and end the call. By default the caller hears:
“We’re sorry, an application error has occurred. Goodbye.”

It may be desirable to handle errors in a custom manner and, for example, forward callers to a call center in the event of an exception with the API. Pyramid provides a set of view decorators to make catching and handling errors fairly simple. In this example, custom TwiML will be returned and the caller will be redirected to a call center for assistance:

@view_defaults(
    renderer="xml",
)
class ExceptionViews(BaseViews):

    def _handle_exception(self):
        response = VoiceResponse()

        self.request.response.status_int = 200

        message = (
            "My apologies. We seem to be experiencing technical difficulties. "
            "You will now be redirected to our call center for assistance."
        )
        response.say(
            message,
            voice="woman",
            language="en",
        )
        response.dial(self.request.registry.settings["support_number"])

        return response

    @notfound_view_config()
    def notfound(self):
        return self._handle_exception()

    @forbidden_view_config()
    def forbidden(self):
        return self._handle_exception()

    @exception_view_config(httpexceptions.HTTPServerError)
    def exception(self):
        return self._handle_exception()

The above code defines views to handle 403, 404, and 500 errors. In the event one of these errors occurs, the custom message defined above will be read to the user. It is important that the status code is set to 200, as a failure to do so will result in Twilio ignoring the TwiML we send and defaulting to the stock error message.

Closing Notes

For additional information on building applications in Python with the Twilio Voice API, see the quickstart documentation.
If any issues are encountered while attempting this tutorial, please note them in the GitHub repo issue tracker so they can be resolved in a timely manner.
My contact information is available on https://patrick.yevsukov.com/ and
my GitHub profile is https://github.com/patrickyevsukov/.

Related Posts

Related Resources

A newspaper article

Twilio Docs

From APIs to SDKs to sample apps

API reference documentation, SDKs, helper libraries, quickstarts, and tutorials for your language and platform.
An Open book

Resource Center

The latest ebooks, industry reports, and webinars

Learn from customer engagement experts to improve your own communication.
User group reactions

Ahoy

Twilio's developer community hub

Best practices, code samples, and inspiration to build communications and digital engagement experiences.