Signal Vine API

The Signal Vine API provides access to your data via HTTPS. We follow a RESTful approach, using standard HTTP verbs and HATEOAS links. To make resource requests you need to create a token and a secret. They are used to sign requests so they can be authorized and authenticated. Contact support to sign up for the beta program and retrieve a token and secret for use with your account.

Calling the API

  1. Create a signature
  2. Add custom headers
  3. Issue request
  4. Enjoy your data

Step 1. Create the signature

You will create a string from components of the HTTP request, and encrypt it using your application secret. The token acts as the shared key is used by the api to decrypt and verify the contents of the signature.

Lowercase & concatenate the following fields together, using \n as a separator.
  • token
  • HTTP verb
  • request path (no server or querystring data)
  • request body
  • timestamp (ISO80601)

Use your secret and token to encrypt the string using SHA2 - 256bit encryption.

Step 2. Add custom headers

The api looks for 2 particular headers on all inbound requests, they contain the timestamp you encoded into the signature, along with the token and signature themselves. The signature should be sent as a BASE64 string.

Header name Format
Authorization token:signature
SignalVine-Date timestamp

encoded in the signature in step 1
This algorithm adapted from this amazon white paper.

Example POST request

Request Headear 
POST https://api.signalvine.com/Foo/Bar?waz=xax HTTP/1.1
Host: https://app.example.com
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 10
SignalVine-Date: 2014-03-11T05:03:08.619Z
Authorization: SignalVine 123456:7LWA3dHvkOC87h5uRVBofIehmeGRxZJ0DFgWra2E6rs
{woo: war}
String to Sign 
123456
post
/foo/bar
{woo: war}
2014-03-11t05:03:08.619z

Example GET request

Request Header 
GET https://api.signalvine.com/Foo/Bar?waz=xax HTTP/1.1
Host: https://app.example.com
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 0
SignalVine-Date: 2014-03-11T05:03:08.619Z
Authorization: SignalVine 123456:7LWA3dHvkOC87h5uRVBofIehmeGRxZJ0DFgWra2E6rs
String to Sign 
123456
get
/foo/bar

2014-03-11t05:03:08.619z