Getting hmac_sha to work between Erlang and PHP

Question

I am trying to get an implementation based on the AWS signed http request API to work between Erlang and PHP. But I can't get it to work.

The core approach is that you constructed a canonical version of an http request and sign it with a secret key and attach that signature to the headers.

On the Erlang side I am using crypto:sha/ which returns a 160 bit/20 byte signature - so I think that is SHA1

On the php side I am using hash_hmac/3 with the sha1 algo.

The Erlang code and output looks like this:

sign2(PrivateKey, Str) ->
    io:format("Str is ~p~n", [Str]),
    Sign = xmerl_ucs:to_utf8(Str),
    io:format("Sign is ~p~n", [Sign]),
    Hash = crypto:sha_mac(PrivateKey, Sign),
    io:format("Hash is ~p~n", [Hash]),
    binary_to_list(base64:encode(Hash)).

giving output of

Hash is <<147,121,203,238,1,247,248,246,157,133,49,21,159,146,41,243,124,101,99,57>>
B64 is "k3nL7gH3+PadhTEVn5Ip83xlYzk="

The PHP signing code is:

public function sign2($privateKey, $str) {
    echo "privateKey is " . $privateKey . "\nstring is " . $str . "\n";
    $hash = hash_hmac('sha1', $str, $privateKey, true);
    $this->dump("hash ", $hash);
    return base64_encode($hash);
}

Giving output of

privateKey is uV3F3YluFJax1cknvbcGwgjvx4QpvB+leU8dUj2o
string is DELETE\n\n\n\nx-amz-date:Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:20:26 +0000\n/johnsmith/photos/puppy.jpg
hash :217 254 129 103 14 29 63 36 176 253 241 183 51 111 120 22 117 125 167 104 
Test hash_test1 fails expected: k3nL7gH3+PadhTEVn5Ip83xlYzk= got 2f6BZw4dPySw/fG3M294FnV9p2g=

This php implementation returns 160 bits/20 bytes which is why I think it ought to match crypto:sha from erlang - but I could be talking mince...

I suspect (from previous experience) that there is some mismatch between what I think hash_hmac is doing and what it actually is.

Answer 1

It's a string problem - turns out single quoted strings and double quoted strings aren't the same in anyway in PHP.

Here's some relevant info: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3446216/difference-between-single-quote-and-double-quote-string-in-php

tl;dr; I was using single quoted strings - when I went to double quoted ones it worked.