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Authentication

You can use either of the following authentication methods when calling APIs:

  • Token-based authentication: Requests are authenticated using a token.
  • AK/SK-based authentication: Requests are authenticated by encrypting the request body using an Access Key ID/Secret Access Key (AK/SK) pair. AK/SK-based authentication is recommended because it provides higher security than token authentication.

Token Authentication

The validity period of a token is 24 hours. If the same token is used for authentication, cache it to prevent frequent API calls.

A token specifies temporary permissions in a computer system. During API authentication using a token, the token is added to requests to get permissions for calling the API.

The process of calling the API for obtaining a user token is described as an example. After a token is obtained, the X-Auth-Token header field must be added to requests to specify the token when calling other APIs. For example, if the token is ABCDEFJ...., X-Auth-Token: ABCDEFJ.... can be added to a request as follows:

POST https://iam.cn-north-1.myhuaweicloud.com/v3/auth/projects
POST https://iam.eu-west-0.prod-cloud-ocb.orange-business.com/v3/auth/projects
POST https://iam.sa-brazil-1.telefonicaopencloud.com/v3/auth/projects
POST https://{{endpoint}}/v3/auth/projects
Content-Type: application/json
X-Auth-Token: ABCDEFJ....

AK/SK-based Authentication

AK/SK-based authentication supports API requests with a body not larger than 12 MB. For API requests with a larger body, token-based authentication is recommended.

In AK/SK-based authentication, AK/SK is used to sign requests and the signature is then added to the requests for authentication.

  • AK: access key ID. It is a unique identifier associated with a secret access key and is used in conjunction with a secret access key to sign requests cryptographically.
  • SK: secret access key used in conjunction with an AK to sign requests cryptographically. It identifies a request sender and prevents the request from being modified.
In AK/SK authentication, you can use an AK/SK to sign requests based on the signature algorithm or use the signing SDK to sign requests.

The signing SDK is only used for signing requests and is different from the SDKs provided by services.

Parent topic: Calling APIs