Securely passing credentials for API authentication - Python 3

Question

In Python 3, I'm passing credentials to authenticate an API call and it works completely fine using the following line:

userAndPass = b64encode(b"username:password").decode("ascii")

For security purposes, what I would prefer to do is store the credentials externally (possibly a yaml file or elsewhere) rather than hard code it. I attempted to replace the username and pass with variables, but that doesn't seem to work. I've tried placing the variable 'credentials' in brackets and also tried adding a plus before hand, neither work.

I would like it to work as follows:

credentials = "username:password"
userAndPass = b64encode(b'credentails').decode("ascii")

Any suggestion is appreciated!

Sam Mason · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-25 15:31:08Z

2

requests lets you pass an auth tuple, for example:

username = 'Antonio'
password = 'xx1234xx'
user_pass = (username, password)

res = requests.get('https://www.example.com/fetch', auth=user_pass)

answered Sep 25, 2018 at 15:31

Sam Mason

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1 Comment

Antonio Over a year ago

Excellent, this is exactly what I was looking for. I didn't realise you could pass it in as a tuple!

Vojtech Kane · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-25 15:32:26Z

2

In this particular case you are passing the variable in a wrong way.

b64encode(b'credentails') means encode the bytes array [c, r, e, d, e, n, t, i, a, l, s].

Use it like that:

credentials = b"username:password" userAndPass = b64encode(credentails).decode("ascii")

EDIT:

In case you would like to obtain the credentials differently:

credentials = somehow_get_credentials_as_string() bytes_credentials = credentials.encode('utf-8') # or whatever the encoding is userAndPass = b64encode(bytes_credentials).decode("ascii")

answered Sep 25, 2018 at 15:32

Vojtech Kane

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3 Comments

Antonio Over a year ago

Thanks, I have attempted this also, but the issue I was facing was to get the "username:password" string as a variable. I think the code example I provided in the question may have misled you. I'll edit it.

Antonio Over a year ago

Although your EDIT may potentially work. Say credential = "username:pass", would the second line where you encode('utf-8') work the same as b"username:pass" ?

Vojtech Kane Over a year ago

@Antonio yes and no. b"string" uses the encoding of the source code, "string".encode('utf-8') uses the provided encoding, so you have to handle it yourself (it basically means stick to one encoding and use it consistently when reading and writing the credentials).

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