Protect your Function with Basic Auth

(warning)

Warning

This example uses headers and cookies, which are only accessible when your Function is running @twilio/runtime-handler version 1.2.0 or later. Consult the Runtime Handler guide to learn more about the latest version and how to update.

When protecting your public Functions, and any sensitive data that they can expose, from unwanted requests and bad actors, it is important to consider some form of authentication to validate that only intended users are making requests. In this example, we'll be covering one of the most common forms of authentication: Basic Authentication.

If you want to learn an alternative approach, you can also see this example of using JWT for authentication.

Let's create a Function that will only accept requests with valid Basic Authentication, and reject all other traffic.

Create and host a Function

In order to run any of the following examples, you will first need to create a Function into which you can paste the example code. You can create a Function using the Twilio Console or the Serverless Toolkit as explained below:

ConsoleServerless Toolkit

If you prefer a UI-driven approach, creating and deploying a Function can be done entirely using the Twilio Console and the following steps:

Log in to the Twilio Console and navigate to the Functions tab. If you need an account, you can sign up for a free Twilio account here!
Functions are contained within Services. Create a Service by clicking the Create Service button and providing a name such as test-function.
Once you've been redirected to the new Service, click the Add + button and select Add Function from the dropdown.
This will create a new Protected Function for you with the option to rename it. The name of the file will be path it is accessed from.
Copy any one of the example code snippets from this page that you want to experiment with, and paste the code into your newly created Function. You can quickly switch examples by using the dropdown menu of the code rail.
Click Save to save your Function's contents.
Click Deploy All to build and deploy the Function. After a short delay, your Function will be accessible from: https://<service-name>-<random-characters>-<optional-domain-suffix>.twil.io/<function-path>
For example: test-function-3548.twil.io/hello-world.

The Serverless Toolkit enables you with local development, project deployment, and other functionality via the Twilio CLI. To get up and running with these examples using Serverless Toolkit, follow this process:

From the CLI, run twilio serverless:init <your-service-name> --empty to bootstrap your local environment.
Navigate into your new project directory using cd <your-service-name>
In the /functions directory, create a new JavaScript file that is named respective to the purpose of the Function. For example, sms-reply.protected.js for a Protected Function intended to handle incoming SMS.
Populate the file using the code example of your choice and save. Note A Function can only export a single handler. You will want to create separate files if you want to run and/or deploy multiple examples at once.

Once your Function(s) code is written and saved, you can test it either by running it locally (and optionally tunneling requests to it via a tool like ngrok), or by deploying the Function and executing against the deployed url(s).

Run your Function in local development

Run twilio serverless:start from your CLI to start the project locally. The Function(s) in your project will be accessible from http://localhost:3000/sms-reply

If you want to test a Function as a Twilio webhook, run: twilio phone-numbers:update <your Twilio phone number> --sms-url "http://localhost:3000/sms-reply"
This will automatically generate an ngrok tunnel from Twilio to your locally running Function, so you can start sending texts to it. You can apply the same process but with the voice-url flag instead if you want to test with Twilio Voice.
If your code does not connect to Twilio Voice/Messages as a webhook, you can start your dev server and start an ngrok tunnel in the same command with the ngrok flag. For example: twilio serverless:start --ngrok=""

Deploy your Function

To deploy your Function and have access to live url(s), run twilio serverless:deploy from your CLI. This will deploy your Function(s) to Twilio under a development environment by default, where they can be accessed from:

https://<service-name>-<random-characters>-dev.twil.io/<function-path>

For example: https://incoming-sms-examples-3421-dev.twil.io/sms-reply

Your Function is now ready to be invoked by HTTP requests, set as the webhook of a Twilio phone number, invoked by a Twilio Studio Run Function Widget, and more!

Authenticate Function requests using Basic Authorization

1exports.handler = (context, event, callback) => {
2  // For the purpose of this example, we'll assume that the username and
3  // password are hardcoded values. Feel free to set these as other values,
4  // or better yet, use environment variables instead!
5  const USERNAME = 'twilio';
6  const PASSWORD = 'ahoy!';
7
8  // Prepare a new Twilio response for the incoming request
9  const response = new Twilio.Response();
10  // Grab the standard HTTP Authorization header
11  const authHeader = event.request.headers.authorization;
12
13  // Reject requests that don't have an Authorization header
14  if (!authHeader) return callback(null, setUnauthorized(response));
15
16  // The auth type and credentials are separated by a space, split them
17  const [authType, credentials] = authHeader.split(' ');
18  // If the auth type doesn't match Basic, reject the request
19  if (authType.toLowerCase() !== 'basic')
20    return callback(null, setUnauthorized(response));
21
22  // The credentials are a base64 encoded string of 'username:password',
23  // decode and split them back into the username and password
24  const [username, password] = Buffer.from(credentials, 'base64')
25    .toString()
26    .split(':');
27  // If the username or password don't match the expected values, reject
28  if (username !== USERNAME || password !== PASSWORD)
29    return callback(null, setUnauthorized(response));
30
31  // If we've made it this far, the request is authorized!
32  // At this point, you could do whatever you want with the request.
33  // For this example, we'll just return a 200 OK response.
34  return callback(null, 'OK');
35};
36
37// Helper method to format the response as a 401 Unauthorized response
38// with the appropriate headers and values
39const setUnauthorized = (response) => {
40  response
41    .setBody('Unauthorized')
42    .setStatusCode(401)
43    .appendHeader(
44      'WWW-Authenticate',
45      'Basic realm="Authentication Required"'
46    );
47
48  return response;
49};

Configure your Function to require Basic Authentication

First, create a new auth Service and add a Public /basic Function using the directions above.

Delete the default contents of the Function, and paste in the code snippet provided above.

Save the Function once it contains the new code.

(information)

Info

Remember to change the visibility of your new Function to be Public. By default, the Console UI will create new Functions as Protected, which will prevent access to your Function except by Twilio requests.

Next, deploy the Function by clicking on Deploy All in the Console UI.

Verify that Basic Authentication is working

We can check that authentication is working first by sending an unauthenticated request to our deployed Function. You can get the URL of your Function by clicking the Copy URL button next to the Function.

Then, using your client of choice, make a GET or POST request to your Function. It should return a 401 Unauthorized since the request contains no valid Authorization header.

curl -i -L -X POST 'https://auth-4173-dev.twil.io/basic'

Result:

1$ curl -i -L -X POST 'https://auth-4173-dev.twil.io/basic'
2
3HTTP/2 401
4date: Tue, 03 Aug 2021 21:55:02 GMT
5content-type: application/octet-stream
6content-length: 12
7www-authenticate: Basic realm="Authentication Required"
8x-shenanigans: none
9
10Unauthorized

Great! Requests are successfully being blocked from non-authenticated requests.

To make an authenticated request and get back a 200 OK, we'll need to generate and send a request with the example username and password encoded as the Authorization header credentials. Leverage one of the following methods to encode your Credentials:

Browser Dev ToolsNode.js REPL

First, open your browser's developer tools. Navigate to the Console tab, where you'll be able to execute the following JavaScript in the browser to generate your encoded credentials:

btoa("<username>:<password>");

The btoa method is a built-in browser method for conveniently converting a string to base64 encoding.

For example, with our example credentials, you would input the following into the browser console and get this result:

1btoa("twilio:ahoy!")
2> "dHdpbGlvOmFob3kh"

Now that you have your encoded credentials, it's time to make an authenticated request to your Function by including them in the Authentication header.

Using cURL with our example credentials would look like this:

1curl -i -L -X POST 'https://auth-4173-dev.twil.io/basic' \
2-H 'Authorization: Basic dHdpbGlvOmFob3kh'
3

and the response would be:

1$ curl -i -L -X POST 'https://auth-4173-dev.twil.io/basic' \
2-H 'Authorization: Basic dHdpbGlvOmFob3kh'
3
4HTTP/2 200
5date: Tue, 03 Aug 2021 22:15:37 GMT
6content-type: text/plain; charset=utf8
7content-length: 2
8x-shenanigans: none
9x-content-type-options: nosniff
10x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
11
12OK

At this point, Basic Authentication is now working for your Function!

To make this example your own, you could experiment with:

Instead of defining the username and password directly in your Function's code, define other secure values and store them securely as Environment Variables. You could then access them using context.USERNAME and context.PASSWORD respectively, for example.
Take things a bit further and establish a database of authenticated users with hashed passwords. Once you've retrieved the decoded username and password from the Authorization header, perform a lookup of the user by username and validate their password using a library such as bcrypt. Your hashing secret can be a secure Environment Variable.