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Webhook event delivery

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Webhooks are one of the many ways to receive events from Azure Event Grid. When a new event is ready, Event Grid service POSTs an HTTP request to the configured endpoint with the event information in the request body.

Like many other services that support webhooks, Event Grid requires you to prove ownership of your Webhook endpoint before it starts delivering events to that endpoint. This requirement prevents a malicious user from flooding your endpoint with events.

Endpoint validation with Event Grid events

When you use any of the following three Azure services, the Azure infrastructure automatically handles this validation:

If you're using any other type of endpoint, such as an HTTP trigger based Azure function, your endpoint code needs to participate in a validation handshake with Event Grid. Event Grid supports two ways of validating the subscription.

  • Synchronous handshake: At the time of event subscription creation, Event Grid sends a subscription validation event to your endpoint. The schema of this event is similar to any other Event Grid event. The data portion of this event includes a validationCode property. Your application verifies that the validation request is for an expected event subscription, and returns the validation code in the response synchronously. This handshake mechanism is supported in all Event Grid versions.

  • Asynchronous handshake: In certain cases, you can't return the validationCode in response synchronously. For example, if you use a third-party service (like Zapier or IFTTT), you can't programmatically respond with the validation code.

    Event Grid supports a manual validation handshake. If you're creating an event subscription with an SDK or tool that uses API version 2018-05-01-preview or later, Event Grid sends a validationUrl property in the data portion of the subscription validation event. To complete the handshake, find that URL in the event data and do a GET request to it. You can use either a REST client or your web browser.

    The provided URL is valid for 10 minutes. During that time, the provisioning state of the event subscription is AwaitingManualAction. If you don't complete the manual validation within 10 minutes, the provisioning state is set to Failed. You have to create the event subscription again before starting the manual validation.

    This authentication mechanism also requires the webhook endpoint to return an HTTP status code of 200 so that it knows that the POST for the validation event was accepted before it can be put in the manual validation mode. In other words, if the endpoint returns 200 but doesn't return back a validation response synchronously, the mode is transitioned to the manual validation mode. If there's a GET on the validation URL within 10 minutes, the validation handshake is considered to be successful.

Note

Using self-signed certificates for validation isn't supported. Use a signed certificate from a commercial certificate authority (CA) instead.

Validation details

  • At the time of event subscription creation/update, Event Grid posts a subscription validation event to the target endpoint.
  • The event contains a header value aeg-event-type: SubscriptionValidation.
  • The event body has the same schema as other Event Grid events.
  • The eventType property of the event is Microsoft.EventGrid.SubscriptionValidationEvent.
  • The data property of the event includes a validationCode property with a randomly generated string. For example, validationCode: acb13….
  • The event data also includes a validationUrl property with a URL for manually validating the subscription.
  • The array contains only the validation event. Other events are sent in a separate request after you echo back the validation code.
  • The EventGrid data plane SDKs have classes corresponding to the subscription validation event data and subscription validation response.

An example SubscriptionValidationEvent is shown in the following example:

[
  {
    "id": "2d1781af-3a4c-4d7c-bd0c-e34b19da4e66",
    "topic": "/subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "subject": "",
    "data": {
      "validationCode": "512d38b6-c7b8-40c8-89fe-f46f9e9622b6",
      "validationUrl": "https://rp-eastus2.eventgrid.azure.net:553/eventsubscriptions/myeventsub/validate?id=0000000000-0000-0000-0000-00000000000000&t=2022-10-28T04:23:35.1981776Z&apiVersion=2018-05-01-preview&token=1A1A1A1A"
    },
    "eventType": "Microsoft.EventGrid.SubscriptionValidationEvent",
    "eventTime": "2022-10-28T04:23:35.1981776Z",
    "metadataVersion": "1",
    "dataVersion": "1"
  }
]

To prove endpoint ownership, echo back the validation code in the validationResponse property, as shown in the following example:

{
  "validationResponse": "512d38b6-c7b8-40c8-89fe-f46f9e9622b6"
}

And, follow one of these steps:

  • You must return an HTTP 200 OK response status code. HTTP 202 Accepted isn't recognized as a valid Event Grid subscription validation response. The HTTP request must complete within 30 seconds. If the operation doesn't finish within 30 seconds, then the operation will be canceled and it may be reattempted after 5 seconds. If all the attempts fail, then it's treated as validation handshake error.

    The fact that your application is prepared to handle and return the validation code indicates that you created the event subscription and expected to receive the event. Imagine the scenario that there's no handshake validation supported and a hacker gets to know your application URL. The hacker can create a topic and an event subscription with your application's URL, and start conducting a DoS attack to your application by sending a lot of events. The handshake validation prevents that to happen.

    Imagine that you already have the validation implemented in your app because you created your own event subscriptions. Even if a hacker creates an event subscription with your app URL, your correct implementation of the validation request event checks for the aeg-subscription-name header in the request to ascertain that it's an event subscription that you recognize.

    Even after that correct handshake implementation, a hacker can flood your app (it already validated the event subscription) by replicating a request that seems to be coming from Event Grid. To prevent that, you must secure your webhook with Microsoft Entra authentication. For more information, see Deliver events to Microsoft Entra protected endpoints.

  • Or, you can manually validate the subscription by sending a GET request to the validation URL. The event subscription stays in a pending state until validated. The validation Url uses port 553. If your firewall rules block port 553, you need to update rules for a successful manual handshake.

    In your validation of the subscription validation event, if you identify that it isn't an event subscription for which you're expecting events, you wouldn't return a 200 response or no response at all. Hence, the validation fails.

For an example of handling the subscription validation handshake, see a C# sample.

Endpoint validation with CloudEvents v1.0

CloudEvents v1.0 implements its own abuse protection semantics using the HTTP OPTIONS method. You can read more about it here. When you use the CloudEvents schema for output, Event Grid uses the CloudEvents v1.0 abuse protection in place of the Event Grid validation event mechanism.

Event schema compatibility

When a topic is created, an incoming event schema is defined. And, when a subscription is created, an outgoing event schema is defined. The following table shows you the compatibility allowed when creating a subscription.

Incoming event schema Outgoing event schema Supported
Event Grid schema Event Grid schema Yes
Cloud Events v1.0 schema Yes
Custom input schema No
Cloud Events v1.0 schema Event Grid schema No
Cloud Events v1.0 schema Yes
Custom input schema No
Custom input schema Event Grid schema Yes
Cloud Events v1.0 schema Yes
Custom input schema Yes

Next steps

See the following article to learn how to troubleshoot event subscription validations: Troubleshoot event subscription validations.