Security Considerations

Hawk HTTP authorization uses a message authentication code (MAC) algorithm to provide partial cryptographic verification of HTTP requests/responses.

Important

Take a look at Hawk’s own security considerations.

Here are some additional security considerations:

  • mohawk is intended to be used as a low-level library. You should never expose its Exceptions publicly, say, in an HTTP response, as they may provide hints to an attacker.
  • Using a shared secret for signatures means that if the secret leaks out then messages can be signed all day long. Make sure secrets are stored somewhere safe and never transmitted over an insecure channel. For example, putting a shared secret in memory on a web browser page may or may not be secure enough.
  • What does partial verification mean? While all major request/response artifacts are signed (URL, protocol, method, content), only the content-type header is signed. You’ll want to make sure your sender and receiver aren’t susceptible to header poisoning in case an attacker finds a way to replay a valid Hawk request with additional headers. For example, if an attacker can find a way to replay a request and add the header x-token: hijacked-token then the request might still be valid because this random header is not part of the signature.
  • Consider Using a nonce to prevent replay attacks.
  • Hawk lets you verify that you’re talking to the person you think you are. In a lot of ways, this is more trustworthy than SSL/TLS but to guard against your own stupidity as well as prevent general eavesdropping, you should probably use both HTTPS and Hawk.
  • The Hawk spec says that signing request/response content is optional but just for extra paranoia, Mohawk raises an exception if you skip content checks unintentionally. Read Skipping content checks for how to intentionally make it optional. This does not apply to empty requests.