VB.NET Requires Chilkat v11.0.0+

Verify Signature of Alexa Custom Skill Request

See more HTTP Misc Examples

This example verifies the signature of an Alexa Custom Skill Request. VB.NET

Dim success As Boolean = False

'  This example assumes you have a web service that will receive requests from Alexa.
'  A sample request sent by Alexa will look like the following:

'  Connection: Keep-Alive
'  Content-Length: 2583
'  Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
'  Accept: application/json
'  Accept-Charset: utf-8
'  Host: your.web.server.com
'  User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.5.x (Java/1.8.0_172)
'  Signature: dSUmPwxc9...aKAf8mpEXg==
'  SignatureCertChainUrl: https://s3.amazonaws.com/echo.api/echo-api-cert-6-ats.pem
'  
'  {"version":"1.0","session":{"new":true,"sessionId":"amzn1.echo-api.session.433 ... }}

'  First, assume we've written code to get the 3 pieces of data we need:
Dim signature As String = "dSUmPwxc9...aKAf8mpEXg=="
Dim certChainUrl As String = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/echo.api/echo-api-cert-6-ats.pem"
Dim jsonBody As String = "{""version"":""1.0"",""session"":{""new"":true,""sessionId"":""amzn1.echo-api.session.433 ... }}"

'  To validate the signature, we do the following:

'  First, download the PEM-encoded X.509 certificate chain that Alexa used to sign the message 
Dim http As New Chilkat.Http
Dim sbPem As New Chilkat.StringBuilder
success = http.QuickGetSb(certChainUrl,sbPem)
If (success = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(http.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If


Dim pem As New Chilkat.Pem
success = pem.LoadPem(sbPem.GetAsString(),"passwordNotUsed")
If (success = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(pem.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If


'  The 1st certificate should be the signing certificate.
Dim cert As Chilkat.Cert = pem.GetCert(0)
If (pem.LastMethodSuccess = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(pem.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If


'  Get the public key from the cert.
Dim pubKey As New Chilkat.PublicKey
cert.GetPublicKey(pubKey)



'  Use the public key extracted from the signing certificate to decrypt the encrypted signature to produce the asserted hash value.
Dim rsa As New Chilkat.Rsa
success = rsa.UsePublicKey(pubKey)
If (success = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(cert.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If


'  RSA "decrypt" the signature.
'  (Amazon's documentation is confusing, because we're simply verifiying the signature against the SHA-1 hash
'  of the request body.  This happens in a single call to VerifyStringENC...)
rsa.EncodingMode = "base64"
Dim bVerified As Boolean = rsa.VerifyStringENC(jsonBody,"sha1",signature)
If (bVerified = True) Then
    Debug.WriteLine("The signature is verified against the JSON body of the request. Yay!")
Else
    Debug.WriteLine("Sorry, not verified.  Crud!")
End If