Toucan provides critical payment credentials and security data (cryptograms) for Pagos customers to use when allowing cardholders to transact. As such, we have gone beyond the simple API key approach to authentication and instead leverage a common HTTP REST-API pattern (AWS, Docusign, etc.) based on a keyed-HMAC (Hash Message Authentication Code) for authentication.

This guide outlines how a developer authenticates and proves their identity to access the Toucan service.

Authentication Credentials

When you first onboard with Pagos Toucan, you’ll obtain the following credentials:

• A public ClientKey
• A private SecretKey

With every request you submit to Toucan, you must submit your public ClientKey, along with a message signature that you generate using your public ClientKey and your private Secret Key combined with the request message itself (e.g. the date and the JSON payload). These details will be combined inside the HTTP headers as part of every request, as shown below.

Once Pagos receives a request we’ll also calculate a signature; if they match, we’ll proceed with the request. Otherwise, an error will be returned and we’ll drop the request as not authorized.

Check out our provisioning a network token code example to see how the signature appears in a request to Toucan.

Authentication Signature HTTP Headers

All calls to Toucan must include an HMAC signature and at least these three headers:

Authentication Signature Algorithm

The requester code will combine the following data elements to form a string, and then use a HMAC library to compute the sha256 digest in base64 format:

• ClientKey
• Date
• Request Payload