Connect your IBKR account

This links your own Interactive Brokers account so you can trade through unisona. It takes about 10 minutes and you don't need to be technical — unisona makes the security keys for you. Do it with a paper (practice) account first.

⏳ One heads-up: after you finish, IBKR can take up to a day to switch your access on. If the first "Connect" doesn't work, wait a bit and try again — it's not broken.

1 Make your keys (on the unisona Settings page)

On Settings → Broker Connection, click 🔑 Generate my keys. unisona creates your security keys right in your browser and downloads three files to your computer:

public_signature.pem
public_encryption.pem
dhparam.pem

The secret half of the keys stays filled in on the unisona page — leave that tab open. You'll only upload the three files above to IBKR.

2 Open IBKR's setup page

Open the IBKR OAuth page →

Read and accept their terms if asked.

3 Fill in the IBKR form

Consumer Key — make up a 9-letter word (letters only — no numbers or symbols), e.g. UNISONAAB. Write it down; you'll need it in step 5.
Public Signing Key — upload public_signature.pem
Public Encryption Key — upload public_encryption.pem
Diffie-Hellman Parameters — upload dhparam.pem

4 Get your two tokens

Click Generate Token (or "Generate Access Token"). IBKR shows an Access Token and an Access Token Secret — copy both right away, because they disappear if you leave or refresh the page. Then flip Enable OAuth Access to on.

🔒 These are like passwords for your account. Keep them private — you'll paste them only into unisona in the next step.

5 Finish on unisona

Go back to the unisona Settings tab (the keys are already filled in). Add:

your Consumer Key (from step 3)
the Access Token and Access Token Secret (from step 4)
your paper account number — it starts with DU

Click Connect & test. A green dot means you're connected. 🎉

Go to Settings → Connect →

Prefer to make the keys yourself with the command line? (advanced)

Instead of "Generate my keys", run these in a terminal (macOS/Linux, or Git Bash/WSL on Windows), upload the two public_*.pem + dhparam.pem to IBKR, and paste the two private keys into unisona. Get the DH prime with the extractor on the connect page.

openssl genrsa -out private_signature.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in private_signature.pem -pubout -out public_signature.pem
openssl genrsa -out private_encryption.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in private_encryption.pem -pubout -out public_encryption.pem
openssl dhparam -out dhparam.pem 2048