Assume role
Assume an IAM role and receive temporary credentials. The caller must be allowed by the role’s trust policy. Can be used by service accounts to get temporary credentials for a specific role.
An optional policy scopes the session down to less than the role
grants; see SessionPolicyDocument.
Authorizations
BASALTIC-HMAC-SHA256 request signing for service-account (access-key) auth.
An AWS-SigV4-style scheme: an HMAC-SHA256 over a canonical request, keyed by a
signing key derived from your secret access key. The basaltic CLI does this
for you; the steps below are for a non-CLI client.
Headers you send
Authorization(this scheme) — format below.X-Date: request time in UTC, compact ISO-8601 basic:YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ(e.g.20240115T103000Z). Must be within 5 minutes of server time.X-Nonce: random per-request value (e.g. 16+ bytes of hex). Required — it is what makes each signature unique so the server can reject replays.X-Datealone is not enough (one-second resolution;UNSIGNED-PAYLOADnever enters the canonical request).X-Content-Sha256(optional): lowercase-hex SHA-256 of the request body, to bind the exact bytes to the signature — the server re-hashes and rejects a mismatch. Omit it, and put the literalUNSIGNED-PAYLOADin the body-hash slot, for an empty body or a streaming upload that shouldn't be buffered.
Authorization header format
<date>:YYYYMMDD(the day part of X-Date).<region>: target region code (e.g.sa-saopaulo-1), orglobalfor the region-agnostic (IAM) endpoints.<service>:basaltic.SignedHeaders: the covered header names, lowercased and sorted, joined by;— at minimumhost;x-date;x-nonce(all three required).Signature: lowercase hex from step 4.- Note the
,(comma + space) between the three Authorization parameters.
Step 1 — canonical request
Join these six lines with \n (LF):
canonical-path: the URL-escaped request path (e.g./v1/compute/instances).canonical-query: each query key and value URL-encoded, sorted by key then value, joined by&; empty string when there is no query.canonical-headers: for each signed header,name:value(name lowercased, value trimmed), sorted by name, each followed by a trailing\n.signed-headers: the same names, lowercased, sorted, joined by;.body-hash: lowercase-hex SHA-256 of the body, or the literalUNSIGNED-PAYLOAD.
Step 2 — string to sign
Join with \n:
The second line is the credential date at midnight — NOT the X-Date value — and the third is the credential scope without the access-key id.
Step 3 — derive the signing key (HMAC chain over your secret)
Step 4 — signature
Example (POST with a JSON body)
Request validity
- Valid for 5 minutes from the X-Date timestamp.
- The signature must cover at least
host,x-date, andx-nonce. - Mutating requests (POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE) that present a signed nonce are
anti-replay guarded for the drift window; omitting
X-Nonceis rejected.
Rate limits
There is no global request budget: a limit applies only where an operation
documents a 429 response, and each such endpoint counts its own fixed
window. Everything else is bounded by quota, not by request rate.
Per-endpoint request limits
A few endpoints are limited in front of the handler, counted per caller —
the authenticated principal when the request carries credentials, the
client IP otherwise. On this API surface that is the public region
catalogue, GET /v1/regions: it guards no secret, and the budget is there
because the catalogue is unauthenticated and database-backed.
An operation that is limited says so by documenting a 429. These
responses — 429 and 2xx — carry the budget, so a client can pace
itself instead of discovering the ceiling by hitting it:
X-RateLimit-Limit— requests allowed per window on this endpoint. Authoritative: read it rather than hard-coding a number.X-RateLimit-Remaining— requests left in the window (0 on a 429).X-RateLimit-Reset— seconds until the window resets. A duration, not a timestamp, so it needs no clock agreement.Retry-After— on a 429 only; seconds to wait. Never zero.
Over the limit the response is 429 with error code RATE_LIMITED. Honor
Retry-After — retrying sooner is refused and extends the window, since
the refused attempt is itself counted.
Service-level limits
Some resources meter the work itself rather than the request, and are
documented on the operation. They return 429 with their own error code
and no rate-limit headers, because the budget is not a per-endpoint window:
sending email is capped per (account, identity) per second
(EMAIL_RATE_LIMIT), and charge attempts are capped per invoice
(INVOICE_PAYMENT_ATTEMPTS_EXHAUSTED).
Body
"7c9e6679-7425-40de-944b-e07fc1f90ae7"
Credential validity duration (15 min to 12 hours)
900 <= x <= 432003600
An inline policy that scopes down the credentials being minted. It grants nothing on its own: every request made with the resulting credentials must be allowed by the caller's identity policies and by this document, so it can only narrow what the caller already has.
The document is validated on the way in and stored with the session — an
invalid one fails the call with INVALID_INPUT rather than being ignored.
Statements take the same shape as in a managed policy but carry no
conditions; a session policy fences on actions and resources only.