Network Working Group J. Reschke Internet-Draft greenbytes Intended status: Standards Track S. Loreto Expires: January 6, 2017 Ericsson July 5, 2016 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-07 Abstract This document describes an Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) content coding that can be used to describe the location of a secondary resource that contains the payload. Editorial Note (To be removed by RFC Editor before publication) Distribution of this document is unlimited. Although this is not a work item of the HTTPbis Working Group, comments should be sent to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) mailing list at ietf-http-wg@w3.org [1], which may be joined by sending a message with subject "subscribe" to ietf-http-wg-request@w3.org [2]. Discussions of the HTTPbis Working Group are archived at . XML versions, latest edits, and issue tracking for this document are available from and . The changes in this draft are summarized in Appendix C.7. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 1] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 This Internet-Draft will expire on January 6, 2017. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 2] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2. Notational Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.1. Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.2. Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.3. Processing Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.4. Problem Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.4.1. Server Not Reachable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.4.2. Resource Not Found . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.4.3. Payload Unusable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.4.4. TLS Handshake Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.5. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.5.1. Basic Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.5.2. Example for an attempt to use 'out-of-band' cross-origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3.5.3. Example involving an encrypted resource . . . . . . . 10 3.5.4. Example For Problem Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.5.5. Relation to Content Negotiation . . . . . . . . . . . 11 4. Content Codings and Range Requests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 5. Feature Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 6.1. Content Modifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 6.2. Content Stealing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 6.3. Use in Requests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Appendix A. Alternatives, or: why not a new Status Code? . . . . 16 Appendix B. Open Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 B.1. Accessing the Secondary Resource Too Early . . . . . . . . 17 B.2. Resource maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 B.3. Fragmenting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 B.4. Relation to Content Encryption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 B.5. Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Appendix C. Change Log (to be removed by RFC Editor before publication) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 C.1. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-00 . . . . . 19 C.2. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-01 . . . . . 19 C.3. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-02 . . . . . 19 C.4. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-03 . . . . . 20 C.5. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-04 . . . . . 20 C.6. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-05 . . . . . 20 C.7. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-06 . . . . . 20 Appendix D. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 3] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 1. Introduction This document describes an Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) content coding (Section 3.1.2.1 of [RFC7231]) that can be used to describe the location of a secondary resource that contains the payload. The primary use case for this content coding is to enable origin servers to securely delegate the delivery of content to a secondary server that might be "closer" to the client (with respect to network topology) and/or able to cache content ([SCD]), leveraging content encryption ([ENCRYPTENC]). 2. Notational Conventions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. This document reuses terminology used in the base HTTP specifications, namely Section 2 of [RFC7230] and Section 3 of [RFC7231]. 3. 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding 3.1. Overview The 'Out-Of-Band' content coding is used to direct the recipient to retrieve the actual message representation (Section 3 of [RFC7231]) from a secondary resource, such as a public cache: 1. Client performs a request 2. Received response specifies the 'out-of-band' content coding; the payload of the response contains additional meta data, plus the location of the secondary resource 3. Client performs GET request on secondary resource (usually again via HTTP(s)) 4. Secondary server provides payload 5. Client combines above representation with additional representation metadata obtained from the primary resource Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 4] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 Client Secondary Server Origin Server sends GET request with Accept-Encoding: out-of-band (1) |---------------------------------------------------------\ status 200 and Content-Coding: out-of-band | (2) <---------------------------------------------------------/ GET to secondary server (3) |---------------------------\ payload | (4) <---------------------------/ (5) Client and combines payload received in (4) with metadata received in (2). 3.2. Definitions The name of the content coding is "out-of-band". The payload format uses JavaScript Object Notation (JSON, [RFC7159]), describing an object describing secondary resources; currently only defining one member: 'sr' A REQUIRED string array containing at least one URI reference (Section 4.1 of [RFC3986]) of a secondary resource (URI references that are relative references are resolved against the URI of the primary resource). [[pext: This payload might be too simple in that there's no simple way to annotate the secondary resources.]] The payload format uses an array so that the origin server can specify multiple secondary resources. The ordering within the array reflects the origin server's preference (if any), with the most preferred secondary resource location being first. Clients receiving a response containing multiple URIs are free to choose which of these to use. In some cases, the origin server might want to specify a "fallback URI"; identifying a secondary resource served by the origin server itself, but otherwise equivalent "regular" secondary resources. Any secondary resource hosted by the origin server can be considered to be a "fallback"; origin servers will usually list them last in the "sr" array so that they only will be used by clients when there is no other choice. New specifications can define new OPTIONAL header fields, thus Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 5] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 clients MUST ignore unknown fields. Extension specifications will have to update this specification. [[anchor3: or we define a registry]] 3.3. Processing Steps Upon receipt of an 'out-of-band' encoded response, a client first needs to obtain the secondary resource's presentation. This is done using an HTTP GET request (independently of the original request method). In order to prevent any leakage of information, the GET request for the secondary resource MUST only contain information provided by the origin server or the secondary server itself, namely HTTP authentication credentials ([RFC7235]) and cookies ([RFC6265]). Furthermore, the request MUST include an "Origin" header field indicating the origin of the original resource ([RFC6454], Section 7). The secondary server MUST verify that the specified origin is authorized to retrieve the given payload (or otherwise return an appropriate 4xx status code). After receipt of the secondary resource's payload, the client then reconstructs the original message by: 1. Unwrapping the encapsulated HTTP message by removing any transfer and content codings. 2. Replacing/setting any response header fields from the primary response except for framing-related information such as Content- Length, Transfer-Encoding and Content-Encoding. If the client is unable to retrieve the secondary resource's representation (host can't be reached, non 2xx response status code, payload failing integrity check, etc.), it can choose an alternate secondary resource (if specified), try the fallback URI (if given), or simply retry the request to the origin server without including 'out-of-band' in the Accept-Encoding request header field. In the latter case, it can be useful to inform the origin server about what problems were encountered when trying to access the secondary resource; see Section 3.4 for details. Note that although this mechanism causes the inclusion of external content, it will not affect the application-level security properties of the reconstructed message, such as its web origin ([RFC6454]). The cacheability of the response for the secondary resource does not affect the cacheability of the reconstructed response message, which Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 6] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 is the same as for the origin server's response. Use of the 'out-of-band' coding is similar to HTTP redirects ([RFC7231], Section 6.4) in that it can lead to cycles. Unless with HTTP redirects, the client however is in full control: it does not need to advertise support for the 'out-of-band' coding in requests for secondary resources. Alternatively, it can protect itself just like for HTTP redirects -- by limiting the number of indirections it supports. Note that because the server's response depends on the request's Accept-Encoding header field, the response usually will need to be declared to vary on that. See Section 7.1.4 of [RFC7231] and Section 2.3 of [RFC7232] for details. 3.4. Problem Reporting When the client fails to obtain the secondary resource, it can be useful to inform the origin server about the condition. This can be accomplished by adding a "Link" header field ([RFC5988]) to a subsequent request to the origin server, detailing the URI of the secondary resource and the failure reason. The following link extension relations are defined: [[purl: purl.org seems to have turned read-only; we may need a different way to mint identifiers]] [[erwip: This is a rough proposal for an error reporting mechanism. Is it good enough? Is it needed at all? Note that Alt-Svc doesn't have anything like this.]] 3.4.1. Server Not Reachable Used in case the server was not reachable. Link relation: http://purl.org/NET/linkrel/not-reachable 3.4.2. Resource Not Found Used in case the server responded, but the object could not be obtained. Link relation: http://purl.org/NET/linkrel/resource-not-found Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 7] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 3.4.3. Payload Unusable Used in case the payload could be obtained, but wasn't usable (for instance, because integrity checks failed). Link relation: http://purl.org/NET/linkrel/payload-unusable 3.4.4. TLS Handshake Failure Used in case of a TLS handshare failure ([RFC5246]). Link relation: http://purl.org/NET/linkrel/tls-handshake-failure 3.5. Examples 3.5.1. Basic Example Client request of primary resource at https://www.example.com/test: GET /test HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com Accept-Encoding: gzip, out-of-band Response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:00 GMT Content-Type: text/plain Cache-Control: max-age=10, public Content-Encoding: out-of-band Content-Length: 133 Vary: Accept-Encoding { "sr": [ "http://example.net/bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a00", "/c/bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a00" ] } (note that the Content-Type header field describes the media type of the secondary's resource representation, and the origin server supplied a fallback URI) Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 8] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 Client request for secondary resource: GET /bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a00 HTTP/1.1 Host: example.net Origin: https://www.example.com Response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:10 GMT Cache-Control: private Content-Length: 15 Hello, world. (Note no Content-Type header field is present here because the secondary server truly does not know the media type of the payload) Final message after recombining header fields: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:00 GMT Content-Length: 15 Cache-Control: max-age=10, public Content-Type: text/plain Hello, world. 3.5.2. Example for an attempt to use 'out-of-band' cross-origin Section 3.3 requires the client to include an "Origin" header field in the request to a secondary server. The example below shows how the server for the secondary resource would respond to a request which contains an "Origin" header field identifying an unauthorized origin. Continuing with the example from Section 3.5.1, and a secondary server that is configured to allow only access for requests initiated by "https://www.example.org": Client request for secondary resource: GET /bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a00 HTTP/1.1 Host: example.net Origin: https://www.example.com Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 9] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 Response: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:10 GMT Note that a request missing the "Origin" header field would be treated the same way. [[anchor6: Any reason why to *mandate* a specific 4xx code?]] 3.5.3. Example involving an encrypted resource Given the example HTTP message from Section 5.4 of [ENCRYPTENC], a primary resource could use the 'out-of-band' coding to specify just the location of the secondary resource plus the contents of the "Crypto-Key" header field needed to decrypt the payload: Response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:00 GMT Content-Encoding: aesgcm, out-of-band Content-Type: text/plain Encryption: keyid="a1"; salt="vr0o6Uq3w_KDWeatc27mUg" Crypto-Key: keyid="a1"; aesgcm="csPJEXBYA5U-Tal9EdJi-w" Content-Length: 85 Vary: Accept-Encoding { "sr": [ "http://example.net/bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a00" ] } (note that the Content-Type header field describes the media type of the secondary's resource representation) Response for secondary resource: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:10 GMT Content-Length: ... VDeU0XxaJkOJDAxPl7h9JD5V8N43RorP7PfpPdZZQuwF (payload body shown in base64 here) Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 10] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 Final message undoing all content codings: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:00 GMT Content-Length: 15 Content-Type: text/plain I am the walrus Note: in this case, the ability to undo the 'aesgcm' is needed to process the response. If 'aesgcm' wasn't listed as acceptable content coding in the request, the origin server wouldn't be able to use the 'out-of-band' mechanism. 3.5.4. Example For Problem Reporting Client requests primary resource as in Section 3.5.1, but the attempt to access the secondary resource fails. Response: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Date: Thu, 08 September 2015 16:49:00 GMT Content-Type: text/plain Content-Length: 20 Resource Not Found Client retries with the origin server and includes Link header field reporting the problem: GET /test HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com Accept-Encoding: gzip, out-of-band Link: ; rel="http://purl.org/NET/linkrel/resource-not-found" 3.5.5. Relation to Content Negotiation Use of the 'out-of-band' encoding is a case of "proactive content negotiation", as defined in Section 3.4 of [RFC7231]. This however does not rule out combining it with other content codings. As an example, the possible iteractions with the 'gzip' content coding ([RFC7230], Section 4.2.3) are described below: Case 1: Primary resource does not support 'gzip' encoding Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 11] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 In this case, the response for the primary resource will never include 'gzip' in the Content-Encoding header field. The secondary resource however might support it, in which case the client could negotiate compression by including "Accept-Encoding: gzip" in the request to the secondary resource. Case 2: Primary resource does support 'gzip' encoding Here, the origin server would actually use two different secondary resources, one of them being gzip-compressed. For instance -- going back to the first example in Section 3.5.1 -- it might reply with: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 18:52:00 GMT Content-Type: text/plain Cache-Control: max-age=10, public Content-Encoding: gzip, out-of-band Content-Length: 133 Vary: Accept-Encoding { "sr": [ "http://example.net/bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a01", "/c/bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a01" ] } which would mean that the payload for the secondary resource already is gzip-compressed. Note: The origin server could also apply gzip compression to the out-of-band payload, in which case the Content-Encoding field value would become: "gzip, out-of-band, gzip". 4. Content Codings and Range Requests The combination of content codings ([RFC7231], Section 3.1.2 with range requests ([RFC7233]) can lead to surprising results, as applying the range request happens after applying content codings. Thus, for a request for the bytes starting at position 100000 of a video: GET /test.mp4 HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com Range: bytes=100000- Accept-Encoding: identity Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 12] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 ...a successful response would use status code 206 (Partial Content) and have a payload containing the octets starting at position 100000. HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content Date: Thu, 08 September 2015 16:49:00 GMT Content-Type: video/mp4 Content-Length: 134567 Content-Range: bytes 100000-234566/234567 (binary data) However, if the request would have allowed the use of 'out-of-band' coding: GET /test.mp4 HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com Range: bytes=100000- Accept-Encoding: out-of-band ...a server might return an empty payload (if the out-of-band coded response body would be shorter than 100000 bytes, as would be usually the case). Thus, in order to avoid unnecessary network traffic, servers SHOULD NOT apply range request processing to responses using ouf-of-band content coding (or, in other words: ignore "Range" request header fields in this case). 5. Feature Discovery New content codings can be deployed easily, as the client can use the "Accept-Encoding" header field (Section 5.3.4 of [RFC7231]) to signal which content codings are supported. 6. Security Considerations 6.1. Content Modifications This specification does not define means to verify that the payload obtained from the secondary resource really is what the origin server expects it to be. Content signatures can address this concern (see [CONTENTSIG] and [MICE]). 6.2. Content Stealing The 'out-of-band' content coding could be used to circumvent the same-origin policy ([RFC6454], Section 3) of user agents: an Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 13] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 attacking site which knows the URI of a secondary resource would use the 'out-of-band' coding to trick the user agent to read the contents of the secondary resource, which then, due to the security properties of this coding, would be handled as if it originated from the origin's resource. This scenario is addressed by the client requirement to include the "Origin" request header field and the server requirement to verify that the request was initiated by an authorized origin. Note: similarities with the "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing" protocol ([CORS]) are intentional. Requiring the secondary resource's payload to be encrypted ([ENCRYPTENC]) is an additional mitigation. 6.3. Use in Requests In general, content codings can be used in both requests and responses. This particular content coding has been designed for responses. When supported in requests, it creates a new attack vector where the receiving server can be tricked into including content that the client might not have access to otherwise (such as HTTP resources behind a firewall). 7. IANA Considerations The IANA "HTTP Content Coding Registry", located at , needs to be updated with the registration below: Name: out-of-band Description: Payload needs to be retrieved from a secondary resource Reference: Section 3 of this document 8. References 8.1. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/ RFC2119, March 1997, . [RFC3986] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 14] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 STD 66, RFC 3986, DOI 10.17487/RFC3986, January 2005, . [RFC5988] Nottingham, M., "Web Linking", RFC 5988, DOI 10.17487/ RFC5988, October 2010, . [RFC6265] Barth, A., "HTTP State Management Mechanism", RFC 6265, DOI 10.17487/RFC6265, April 2011, . [RFC7159] Bray, T., "The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data Interchange Format", RFC 7159, DOI 10.17487/RFC7159, March 2014, . [RFC7230] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing", RFC 7230, DOI 10.17487/RFC7230, June 2014, . [RFC7231] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content", RFC 7231, DOI 10.17487/RFC7231, June 2014, . [RFC7235] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication", RFC 7235, DOI 10.17487/RFC7235, June 2014, . 8.2. Informative References [CONTENTSIG] Thomson, M., "Content-Signature Header Field for HTTP", draft-thomson-http-content-signature-00 (work in progress), July 2015. [CORS] van Kesteren, A., "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing", W3C Recommendation REC-cors-20140116, January 2014, . Latest version available at . [ENCRYPTENC] Thomson, M., "Encrypted Content-Encoding for HTTP", draft-ietf-httpbis-encryption-encoding-02 (work in progress), June 2016. [MICE] Thomson, M., "Merkle Integrity Content Encoding", Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 15] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 draft-thomson-http-mice-01 (work in progress), June 2016. [RFC2017] Freed, N. and K. Moore, "Definition of the URL MIME External-Body Access-Type", RFC 2017, DOI 10.17487/ RFC2017, October 1996, . [RFC4483] Burger, E., "A Mechanism for Content Indirection in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Messages", RFC 4483, DOI 10.17487/RFC4483, May 2006, . [RFC5246] Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, DOI 10.17487/RFC5246, August 2008, . [RFC6454] Barth, A., "The Web Origin Concept", RFC 6454, DOI 10.17487/RFC6454, December 2011, . [RFC7232] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Conditional Requests", RFC 7232, DOI 10.17487/RFC7232, June 2014, . [RFC7233] Fielding, R., Ed., Lafon, Y., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Range Requests", RFC 7233, DOI 10.17487/RFC7233, June 2014, . [SCD] Thomson, M., Eriksson, G., and C. Holmberg, "An Architecture for Secure Content Delegation using HTTP", draft-thomson-http-scd-01 (work in progress), June 2016. URIs [1] [2] Appendix A. Alternatives, or: why not a new Status Code? A plausible alternative approach would be to implement this functionality one level up, using a new redirect status code (Section 6.4 of [RFC7231]). However, this would have several drawbacks: Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 16] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 o Servers will need to know whether a client understands the new status code; thus some additional signal to opt into this protocol would always be needed. o In redirect messages, representation metadata (Section 3.1 of [RFC7231]), namely "Content-Type", applies to the response message, not the redirected-to resource. o The origin-preserving nature of using a content coding would be lost. Another alternative would be to implement the indirection on the level of the media type using something similar to the type "message/ external-body", defined in [RFC2017] and refined for use in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in [RFC4483]. This approach though would share most of the drawbacks of the status code approach mentioned above. Appendix B. Open Issues B.1. Accessing the Secondary Resource Too Early One use-case for this protocol is to enable a system of "blind caches", which would serve the secondary resources. These caches might only be populated on demand, thus it could happen that whatever mechanism is used to populate the cache hasn't finished when the client hits it (maybe due to race conditions, or because the cache is behind a middlebox which doesn't allow the origin server to push content to it). In this particular case, it can be useful if the client was able to "piggyback" the URI of the fallback for the primary resource, giving the secondary server a means by which it could obtain the payload itself. This information could be provided in yet another Link header field: GET /bae27c36-fa6a-11e4-ae5d-00059a3c7a00 HTTP/1.1 Host: example.net Link: ; rel="http://purl.org/NET/linkrel/fallback-resource" (continuing the example from Section 3.5.1) B.2. Resource maps When 'out-of-band' coding is used as part of a caching solution, the additional round trips to the origin server can be a significant Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 17] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 performance problem; in particular, when many small resources need to be loaded (such as scripts, images, or video fragments). In cases like these, it could be useful for the origin server to provide a "resource map", allowing to skip the round trips to the origin server for these mapped resources. Plausible ways to transmit the resource map could be: o as extension in the 'out-of-band' coding JSON payload, or o as separate resource identified by a "Link" response header field. This specification does not define a format, nor a mechanism to transport the map, but it's a given that some specification using 'out-of-band' coding will do. B.3. Fragmenting It might be interesting to divide the original resource's payload into fragments, each of which being mapped to a distinct secondary resource. This would allow to not store the full payload of a resource in a single cache, thus o distribute load, o caching different parts of the resource with different characteristics (such as only distribute the first minutes of a long video), or o fetching specific parts of a resource (similar to byte range requests), or o hiding information from the secondary server. Another benefit might be that it would allow the origin server to only serve the first part of a resource itself (reducing time to play of a media resource), while delegating the remainder to a cache (however, this might require further adjustments of the 'out-of-band' payload format). B.4. Relation to Content Encryption Right now this specification is orthogonal to [ENCRYPTENC]/[MICE]; that is, it could be used for public content such as software downloads. However, the lack of mandatory encryption affects the security considerations (which currently try to rule attack vectors caused by ambient authority ([RFC6265], Section 8.2). We need to decide whether we need this level of independence. Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 18] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 B.5. Reporting This specification already defines hooks through which a client can report failures when accessing secondary resources (see Section 3.4). However, it would be useful if there were also ways to report on statistics such as: o Success (Cache Hit) rates, and o Bandwidth to secondary servers. This could be implemented using a new service endpoint and a (JSON?) payload format. Similarly, a reporting facility for use by the secondary servers could be useful. Appendix C. Change Log (to be removed by RFC Editor before publication) C.1. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-00 Mention media type approach. Explain that clients can always fall back not to use oob when the secondary resource isn't available. Add Vary response header field to examples and mention that it'll usually be needed (). Experimentally add problem reporting using piggy-backed Link header fields (). C.2. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-01 Updated ENCRYPTENC reference. C.3. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-02 Add MICE reference. Remove the ability of the secondary resource to contain anything but the payload (). Changed JSON payload to be an object containing an array of URIs plus additional members. Specify "fallback" as one of these additional members, and update Appendix B.1 accordingly). Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 19] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 Discuss extensibility a bit. C.4. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-03 Mention "Content Stealing" thread. Mention padding. C.5. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-04 Reduce information leakage by disallowing ambient authority information being sent to the secondary resource. Require "Origin" to be included in request to secondary resource, and require secondary server to check it. Mention "Origin" + server check on secondary resource as defense to content stealing. Update ENCRYPTENC reference, add SCD reference. Mention fragmentation feature. Discuss relation with range requests. C.6. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-05 Remove redundant Cache-Control: private from one example response (the response payload is encrypted anyway). Mention looping. Remove 'metadata' payload element. Align with changes in ENCRYPTENC spec. Fix incorrect statement about what kind of cookies/credentials can be used in the request to the secondary resource. Rename "URIs" to "sr" ("secondary resources") and treat the fallback URI like a regular secondary resource. Mention reporting protocol ideas. C.7. Changes since draft-reschke-http-oob-encoding-06 Changed the link relation name to the fallback resource from "primary" to "fallback". Added link relation for reporting TLS handshake failures. Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 20] Internet-Draft 'Out-Of-Band' Content Coding for HTTP July 2016 Added an example about the interaction with 'gzip' coding. Update ENCRYPTENC, MICE, and SCD references. Appendix D. Acknowledgements Thanks to Christer Holmberg, Daniel Lindstrom, Erik Nygren, Goran Eriksson, John Mattsson, Kevin Smith, Magnus Westerlund, Mark Nottingham, Martin Thomson, and Roland Zink for feedback on this document. Authors' Addresses Julian F. Reschke greenbytes GmbH Hafenweg 16 Muenster, NW 48155 Germany EMail: julian.reschke@greenbytes.de URI: http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/ Salvatore Loreto Ericsson Torshamnsgatan 21 Stochholm 16483 Sweden EMail: salvatore.loreto@ericsson.com Reschke & Loreto Expires January 6, 2017 [Page 21]