I am reading this documentation from Mastodon.

And from it, I understand that Mastodon requires an HTTP Signature, signing at least these headers:
(request-target) host date digest

If your client is written in JavaScript and runs on Nodejs, an example for how to build a signature is given on the npmjs site.

But I believe this example is out of date. It does not use the (request-target) pseudo header. So that’s not gonna work.

So what must you do? Go back to the Mastodon documentation. Unfortunately, that too, is either out of date or confusing. For a post request, the mastodon documentation states that you must first compute the “RSA-SHA256 digest hash of your request’s body”. This is not correct. There is no such thing as “RSA-SHA256 digest”! RSA-SHA256 is not the name of a digest. Message Digests include: SHA1, SHA256, MD5 (old and insecure at this point) and others. According to my reading of the code, Mastodon supports only SHA-256 digests. The documentation should state that you must compute the “SHA256 digest”. (There is no RSA key involved in computing a digest).

Regardless of the digest algorithm you use, the computed digest is a byte array. That brings us to the next question: how to encode that byte array as a string, in order to pass it to Mastodon. Some typical options for encoding are: hex encoding (aka base16 encoding), base64 encoding, or base64-url encoding. The documentation does not state which of those encodings is accepted. Helpfully, the example provided in the documentation shows a digest string that appears to be hex-encoded. Unhelpfully, again according to my reading of the code, Mastodon requires a base64-encoded digest!

With these gaps and misleading things in the documentation, I think it would be impossible for a neophyte to navigate the documentation and successfully implement a client that passes a validatable signature.

1. produce the POST body
2. compute the SHA-256 digest of the POST body, including all whitepsace and leading or trailing newlines. Try this online tool to help you verify your work.
3. Encode that computed digest (which is a byte array) with base64. This should produce a string of about 44 characters.
4. Set the Digest header to be SHA-256=xxxyyyyy , where xxxyyyy is the base64 encoding of the SHA-256 digest.
5. Set the http headers for the pending outbound request to include at least host, date, and digest.
6. compute the signature following the example from the npmjs.com site, with headers of “(request-target) host date digest”, and using the appropriate RSA key pair.

If it were me, I would also include a :created: and an :expires: field in the http signature.

You can play around with HTTP Signatures using this online tool. That tool does not yet support computing a Digest of a POST body, but I’ll look into extending it to do that too.

Let me know in the comments if any of this is not clear.

I posted a working example for Nodejs as a gist on Github.

It depends only on nodejs and the builtin libraries for crypto and URL to compute the hash/digest and signature. It does not actually send a request to Mastodon; that is left for you to do.