Reference Guide

Authentication Headers

All API requests require 3 custom HTTP headers for authentication.

• X-dell-auth-key

• X-dell-auth-signature

• X-dell-auth-timestamp

In order to compute the authentication headers, first a REST call must be made to the /Authenticate

endpoint. The Full URI is /Api/V1/Authenticate.

This call must be a POST request supplying either an XML or JSON payload. For illustration, the XML

payload will follow the structure below providing the user name and password:

<userName>admin</userName>

<domain>ASMLOCAL</domain>

</AuthenticateRequest>

This call must be a POST request supplying either an XML or JSON payload. For illustration, the XML

payload will follow the structure below providing the user name and password:

Depending on the Accept header, the response will contain either an XML or JSON payload. For

illustration we show the XML version:

<userName>admin</userName>

<domain>ASMLOCAL</domain>

<role>Administrator</role>

</AuthenticateResponse>

The returned apiKey and apiSecret from the XML response above will then be used to generate the

security headers. The method is to concatenate 5 values and then compute a digest using the apiSecret

from above. For illustration, a Ruby implementation of the generated headers is shown. This relies on the

base64 and openssl gems to compute the signature and is extracted from the supplied Ruby ASM module

discussed further in Appendix C.

apiKey = '34b3577f7c3c03174a9a506b'

apiSecret = '9a6d9692ba64142e6a1934f9be994f3b0ae63959a6132c8b'

timestamp = Time.now.to_i.to_s

# Concatenate the following values

requestString = "%s:%s:%s:%s:%s" %

[apiKey,httpMethod,uriPath,userAgent,timestamp]

# Compute a digest on concatenated string using apiSecret

hash_str = OpenSSL::HMAC.digest('sha256',apiSecret,requestString)

signature = Base64.strict_encode64(hash_str)