Gateway API Overview

The Polybase DB Gateway REST API provides a convenient way to access the Polybase DB decentralized network.

Authentication

The Polybase DB Gatweay API uses public/private key pair for authentication. That means it works natively with wallets like Metamask.

Authentication is composed of:

• v the version being used, should be v=0
• t current unix timestamp in milliseconds
• h type of hash signing being used eth-personal-sign is currently the only allowed option
• sig the signature of the data (see below)
• pk optional 64 byte public key (secp256k1 algorithm)

An example of a valid authroization:

v=0,t=1671884992,h=eth-personal-sign,sig=0x288db6271d92253ae19983a8e5110f1bc1bef1911210127ccbf657d85428ba9917aa9457f0f8e7f300a36b106525d3a3471e63ae265af4898742040a377e1da11c

The token is passed in the X-Polybase-Signature header of the request.

Signature (sig)

To generate sig you must sign a string in the format <timestamp>.<body_json>. Where timestamp is the t you provided above, and body_json is the body of the request (as a JSON string).

You can use the @polybase/util (opens in a new tab) package to generate the signature from any 32 bytes private key, and the sign function to create the signature.

import { secp256k1 } from '@polybase/util'
 
// You can use any 32 byte private key from any library, 
// here is an example from @polybase/util
let private_key = secp256k1.generatePrivateKey();
 
function createSig (timestamp, body) {
  const str_to_sign = `${timestamp}.${JSON.stringify(body)}`;
  return secp256k1.sign(privateKey, str_to_sign);
}