Vault Management API Item Creation unknown cipher type

Ask the Community Password Manager
1

Hi all,

I want to create a new item through the Vault Management API. I have already created a folder without problems, but when I send the HTTP POST with the new item, I get an error 500 and the bw cli throws the error:

Error: Unknown cipher type.

From what I found, the item needs to be encoded, which can be done in bw cli using the ‘encode’ command. But I can’t find out how I should encode my HTTP data before sending it to the REST API.

I’m using Python 3.10

I tried encoding the body as b64 using base64.b64encode(data_json.encode()) , but I get the same error,

Can someone give me a hint what I am missing to create a new item?

Thanks!

2

Have you tried making your requests with HTTPS instead of plain-text HTTP?

3

You can get an example from our API Docs. No encoding needed for Vault Management API

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://localhost/object/item' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "organizationId": "3c89a31d-f1cc-4673-8d5a-ae2700f9860d",
  "collectionId": "c4e31257-f3e1-4b13-895a-ae2700f9884e",
  "folderId": null,
  "type": 1,
  "name": "Shared Twitter Account",
  "notes": null,
  "favorite": false,
  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "Security Question",
      "value": "Bitwarden Rules",
      "type": 0
    }
  ],
  "login": {
    "uris": [
      {
        "match": 0,
        "uri": "https://twitter.com/login"
      }
    ],
    "username": "[email protected]",
    "password": "b@dP@$word",
    "totp": null
  },
  "reprompt": true
}'
1 Like
4

Vault Management API only serves HTTP. It’s meant to be local, hence SSL is not required.

5

Thank you for your reply.

In the example there is nothing mentioned about encoding. it looks to me like the data is just plain JSON. But I get the error 500 when I send it like that.

looks like this:

{
   "folderId":"3179303d-4b09-4c37-89fd-aed800f8476c",
   "type":1,
   "notes":"None",
   "login":{
      "uris":[
         {
            "uri":"None"
         }
      ],
      "username":"Administrator",
      "password":"MyPassw0rd!",
      "totp":"None"
   },
   "name":"Administrator"
}

Then I tested it with the following headers and without:

headers = {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        'accept': 'application/json'
    }

When I send it with headers, I get an error 400
SyntaxError: invalid JSON, only supports object and array

When I send it without headers, I get an error 500
Error: Unknown cipher type.

Edit: I got it to work!
I will leave this comment up for anyone who wants to do this in the future or gets a similar error.

I use Python with the requests library to send the HTTP requests.
For it to work the data dict needs to be converted to a string using the JSON library and then the headers need to be added to the request, before that I just added the data as a dict and let the requests library do the conversion but that does not work.

Example:

import json
import requests

BASE_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:8087'


def create_entry(name: str, username: str = "", password: str = "", uri_list: list = None, notes: str = "",
                 folder_name: str = "Keepass-Default", **kwargs):
    target_url = f'{BASE_URL}/object/item'
    login_data = {
        "uris": uri_list,
        "username": username,
        "password": password,
        "totp": None
    }
    folder_id = get_folderid(folder_name)
    data = {
        "folderId": folder_id,
        "type": 1,
        "notes": notes,
        "login": login_data,
        "name": name,
    }
    json_data = json.dumps(data)
    headers = {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        'accept': 'application/json'
    }
    s = requests.Session()
    r = s.post(target_url, timeout=20, data=json_data, headers=headers)
    return r.json()['data']
1 Like