Uppercase bucket name breaks API

[atimb]

If you use a bucket name containing uppercase characters, the exports.stringToSign(options) call in auth.js will return the resource name with uppercase characters, however Amazon waits this in strictly lowercase format in the signature.

Example:

Init knox with bucket name testUpperCase

StringToSign in knox:

GET


Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:51:56 GMT
/testUpperCase/pic.jpg

Amazon response HTTP 403:

<Error><Code>SignatureDoesNotMatch</Code> [...]
<StringToSign>GET


Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:51:56 GMT
/testuppercase/pic.jpg</StringToSign> [...]

[alhui]

May also be experiencing this problem. Our bucket has capitals in it, GSTest

[ntkachov]

I can confirm that this is an issue. Using a bucketname such as "cloud" works where as "Cloud" does not.

We used a simple get request on S3. a captial letter bucketname returns an 403 but the same request with a lowercase letter returns the file.

[domenic]

So stringToSign should lowercase before returning? Sounds easy enough. Want to submit a patch and get all the fame and glory?

[domenic]

After investigating this, it's unfortunately a lot more complicated. The punchline is, I don't think we should support mixed-case buckets.

The reasoning is that mixed-case bucket names are not DNS-compliant. They can only be created in the US Standard region, and are recommended against by Amazon.

Furthermore, since you can't access them "virtual hosted style" (i.e. with urls like http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com), due to this DNS-incompliance, you must access them "path style." (Amazon explains the differences here.) But this has a large number of disadvantages. You start needing to specify a different endpoint per region, and you cannot access programatically-created buckets using the path style. So that's not really a good option.

I think the best thing to do is add a nice error message if the user tries to pass mixed-case bucket names to Knox, and error out early.

[whiteb0x]

Hey Domenic - is there a quick fix for the S3 lowercase bucket name error in the Demo for the app? I can't seem to get it working.

[domenic]

@whiteb0x I am not sure what demo and what app you are talking about?

I think you can use uppercase names now, it switches to path style and turns off HTTPS which should work...