Authentication

We have a two-fold authentication framework to ensure that the caller of the API is known and that calls have not been tampered with en route.

How authentication works

OAuth 2.0

The Investment API uses opaque access tokens obtained using the OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials flow.

During the onboarding process, each client receives a client ID and a client secret that can be used to request access tokens via our OAuth2 endpoints.

Authentication scopes

The Upvest Investment API supports granular authentication scopes, thus improving security. You can restrict the permissions and data that is requested during authentication by specifying the scopes.

The following table lists available scopes:

Scope	Permissions
accounts:read	Read accounts and accounts groups.
accounts:admin	Create/update/delete accounts and accounts groups.
webhooks:admin	Create/update/delete webhooks.
webhooks:read	Read webhooks.
orders:admin	Create/update/delete orders.
orders:read	Read orders.
users:admin	Create/update/delete users.
users:read	Read users.
checks:admin	Create checks.
checks:read	Read checks.
positions:read	Read positions.
reference_accounts:admin	Create/update/delete reference accounts.
reference:accounts:read	Read reference accounts.
mandates:admin	Create/update/delete mandates.
mandates:read	Read mandates.
payments:admin	Payments and withdrawal operations.
payments:read	Payments and withdrawal read operations.
reports:read	Read reports.
taxes:read	Read tax residencies.
taxes:admin	Modify tax residencies.
instruments:read	Read instruments.
fees:admin	Create and read fee operations.
fees:read	Read fee operations.
portfolios:read	Read portfolios.
portfolios:admin	Modify portfolios.
reinvestments:read	Read reinvestments.
reinvestments:admin	Modify reinvestments.
valuations:read	Read account valuations.

Once the access token is returned, the token can be used in all requests for the specific required scopes using the standard authorization header as shown below:

Example header

Authorization: Bearer <access_token>

The use of client_credentials alone allows us to identify you and authorise your request. However, it does not protect against a man-in-the-middle attack, where the request can be maliciously modified. To mitigate this risk, there is an additional layer of public key infrastructure in the form of HTTP signatures.

HTTP signatures

OAuth 2.0 is only used to authenticate your client backend calling the Upvest API (i.e. to know who is the client calling the Upvest API). In addition, we also want to make sure that the call is actually coming from your backend and has not been tampered with along the way. For this we use HTTP message signatures

HTTP message signatures should be considered transparent and any request sent to the Investment API must be signed with the private key corresponding to the OAuth 2.0 client_id. If this is not the case, the request will be rejected.

Once HTTP signatures are in place, normal OAuth 2.0 flows can be used. To do this, get a scoped access token with client_id and client_secret and use the access token to call the Investment API.

Detailed instructions on how to calculate the signature can be found here.