Authenticate Azure Event Grid publishing clients using access keys or shared access signatures

This article provides information on authenticating clients that publish events to Azure Event Grid topics, domains, partner namespaces using access key or Shared Access Signature (SAS) token.

Important

• Authenticating and authorizing users or applications using Microsoft Entra identities provides superior security and ease of use over key-based and shared access signatures (SAS) authentication. With Microsoft Entra ID, there is no need to store secrets used for authentication in your code and risk potential security vulnerabilities. We strongly recommend you use Microsoft Entra ID with your Azure Event Grid event publishing applications. For more information, see Authenticate publishing clients using Microsoft Entra ID.
• Microsoft Entra authentication isn't supported for namespace topics.

Authenticate using access key

Access key authentication is the simplest form of authentication. You can pass the access key as an HTTP header or a URL query parameter.

Access key in an HTTP header

Pass the access key as a value for the HTTP header: aeg-sas-key.

aeg-sas-key: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX0GXXX/nDT4hgdEj9DpBeRr38arnnm5OFg==

Access key as a query parameter

You can also specify aeg-sas-key as a query parameter.

https://<yourtopic>.<region>.eventgrid.azure.net/api/events?aeg-sas-key=XXXXXXXX53249XX8XXXXX0GXXX/nDT4hgdEj9DpBeRr38arnnm5OFg==

For instructions on how to get access keys for a topic or domain, see Get access keys.

Authenticate using SAS

SAS tokens for an Event Grid resource include the resource, expiration time, and a signature. The format of the SAS token is: r={resource}&e={expiration}&s={signature}.

The resource is the path for the Event Grid topic to which you're sending events. For example, a valid resource path is: https://<yourtopic>.<region>.eventgrid.azure.net/api/events. To see all the supported API versions, see Microsoft.EventGrid resource types.

First, programmatically generate a SAS token and then use the aeg-sas-token header or Authorization SharedAccessSignature header to authenticate with Event Grid.

Generate SAS token programmatically

The following example creates a SAS token for use with Event Grid:

static string BuildSharedAccessSignature(string resource, DateTime expirationUtc, string key)
{
    const char Resource = 'r';
    const char Expiration = 'e';
    const char Signature = 's';

    string encodedResource = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(resource);
    var culture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US");
    var encodedExpirationUtc = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(expirationUtc.ToString(culture));

    string unsignedSas = $"{Resource}={encodedResource}&{Expiration}={encodedExpirationUtc}";
    using (var hmac = new HMACSHA256(Convert.FromBase64String(key)))
    {
        string signature = Convert.ToBase64String(hmac.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(unsignedSas)));
        string encodedSignature = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(signature);
        string signedSas = $"{unsignedSas}&{Signature}={encodedSignature}";

        return signedSas;
    }
}

def generate_sas_token(uri, key, expiry=3600):
    ttl = datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(seconds=expiry)
    encoded_resource = urllib.parse.quote_plus(uri)
    encoded_expiration_utc = urllib.parse.quote_plus(ttl.isoformat())

    unsigned_sas = f'r={encoded_resource}&e={encoded_expiration_utc}'
    signature = b64encode(HMAC(b64decode(key), unsigned_sas.encode('utf-8'), sha256).digest())
    encoded_signature = urllib.parse.quote_plus(signature)
    
    token = f'r={encoded_resource}&e={encoded_expiration_utc}&s={encoded_signature}'

    return token

Using aeg-sas-token header

Here's an example of passing the SAS token as a value for the aeg-sas-token header.

aeg-sas-token: r=https%3a%2f%2fmytopic.eventgrid.azure.net%2fapi%2fevents&e=6%2f15%2f2017+6%3a20%3a15+PM&s=XXXXXXXXXXXXX%2fBPjdDLOrc6THPy3tDcGHw1zP4OajQ%3d

Using Authorization header

Here's an example of passing the SAS token as a value for the Authorization header.

Authorization: SharedAccessSignature r=https%3a%2f%2fmytopic.eventgrid.azure.net%2fapi%2fevents&e=6%2f15%2f2017+6%3a20%3a15+PM&s=XXXXXXXXXXXXX%2fBPjdDLOrc6THPy3tDcGHw1zP4OajQ%3d

Next steps

See Event delivery authentication to learn about authentication with event handlers to deliver events.