HTTP Working Group M. Nottingham Internet-Draft E. Nygren Intended status: Standards Track Akamai Expires: April 1, 2017 September 28, 2016 The ORIGIN HTTP/2 Frame draft-ietf-httpbis-origin-frame-latest Abstract This document specifies the ORIGIN frame for HTTP/2, to indicate what origins are available on a given connection. Note to Readers Discussion of this draft takes place on the HTTP working group mailing list (ietf-http-wg@w3.org), which is archived at https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/. Working Group information can be found at http://httpwg.github.io/; source code and issues list for this draft can be found at https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/labels/origin-frame. 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." This Internet-Draft will expire on April 1, 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 Nottingham & Nygren Expires April 1, 2017 [Page 1] Internet-Draft ORIGIN Frames September 2016 (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. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.1. Notational Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. The ORIGIN HTTP/2 Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1. The Origin Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2. Processing ORIGIN Frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Nottingham & Nygren Expires April 1, 2017 [Page 2] Internet-Draft ORIGIN Frames September 2016 1. Introduction HTTP/2 [RFC7540] allows clients to coalesce different origins [RFC6454] onto the same connection when certain conditions are met. However, in certain cases, a connection is is not usable for a coalesced origin, so the 421 (Misdirected Request) status code ([RFC7540], Section 9.1.2) was defined. Using a status code in this manner allows clients to recover from misdirected requests, but at the penalty of adding latency. To address that, this specification defines a new HTTP/2 frame type, "ORIGIN", to allow servers to indicate what origins a connection is usable for. 1.1. 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]. 2. The ORIGIN HTTP/2 Frame The ORIGIN HTTP/2 frame ([RFC7540], Section 4) allows a server to indicate what origin(s) [RFC6454] the server would like the client to consider as members of the Origin Set (Section 2.1) for the connection it occurs within. The ORIGIN frame type is 0xb (decimal 11). +-------------------------------+-------------------------------+ | Origin-Len (16) | Origin? (*) ... +-------------------------------+-------------------------------+ The ORIGIN frame's payload contains the following fields, sets of which may be repeated within the frame to indicate multiple origins: Origin-Len: An unsigned, 16-bit integer indicating the length, in octets, of the Origin field. Origin: An optional sequence of characters containing the ASCII serialization of an origin ([RFC6454], Section 6.2) that the sender believes this connection is or could be authoritative for. The ORIGIN frame defines the following flags: Nottingham & Nygren Expires April 1, 2017 [Page 3] Internet-Draft ORIGIN Frames September 2016 CLEAR (0x1): Indicates that the Origin Set MUST be reset to an empty set before processing the contents of the frame it occurs upon. REMOVE (0x2): Indicates that the origin(s) carried in the payload must be removed from the Origin Set, if present; if not present, it/they have no effect. 2.1. The Origin Set The set of origins (as per [RFC6454]) that a given connection might be used for is known in this specification as the Origin Set. When a connection is first established, its Origin Set is defined to be those origins that the client would normally consider the connection authoritative for; see [RFC7540], Section 10.1. The ORIGIN frame allows the server to modify the Origin Set. In particular: 1. A server can add to its members by sending an ORIGIN frame (without any flags set); 2. A server can prune one or more origins from it by sending an ORIGIN frame with the REMOVE flag set; 3. A server can remove all its members and then add zero or more members by sending an ORIGIN frame with the CLEAR flag set and a payload containing the new origins. Adding to the Origin Set (cases 1 and 3 above) does not imply that the connection is authoritative for the added origins (in the sense of [RFC7540], Section 10.1) on its own; this MUST be established by some other mechanism. A client that implements this specification MUST NOT use a connection for a given origin unless that origin appears in the Origin Set for the connection, regardless of whether or not it believes that the connection is authoritative for that origin. 2.2. Processing ORIGIN Frames The ORIGIN frame is a non-critical extension to HTTP/2. Endpoints that do not support this frame can safely ignore it upon receipt. When received by a client, it can be used to inform HTTP/2 connection coalescing (see Section 2.1), but does not relax the requirement there that the server is authoritative. The origin frame MUST be sent on stream 0; an ORIGIN frame on any other stream is invalid and MUST be ignored. Nottingham & Nygren Expires April 1, 2017 [Page 4] Internet-Draft ORIGIN Frames September 2016 The ORIGIN frame is processed hop-by-hop. An intermediary MUST NOT forward ORIGIN frames. Clients configured to use a proxy MUST ignore any ORIGIN frames received from it. The following algorithm illustrates how a client can handle received ORIGIN frames: 1. If the client is configured to use a proxy, ignore the frame and stop processing. 2. If the frame occurs upon any stream except stream 0, ignore the frame and stop processing. 3. If the CLEAR flag is set, remove all members from the Origin Set. 4. For each Origin field "origin_raw" in the frame payload: 1. Parse "origin_raw" as an ASCII serialization of an origin ([RFC6454], Section 6.2) and let the result be "parsed_origin". 2. If the REMOVE flag is set, remove any member of the Origin Set that is the same as "parsed_origin" (as per [RFC6454], Section 5), and continue to the next "parsed_origin". 3. Otherwise, add "parsed_origin" to the Origin Set. 3. Security Considerations Clients that blindly trust the ORIGIN frame's contents will be vulnerable to a large number of attacks; hence the reinforcement that this specification does not relax the requirement for server authority in [RFC7540], Section 10.1. 4. 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, . [RFC6454] Barth, A., "The Web Origin Concept", RFC 6454, DOI 10.17487/RFC6454, December 2011, . [RFC7540] Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)", RFC 7540, DOI 10.17487/RFC7540, May 2015, . Nottingham & Nygren Expires April 1, 2017 [Page 5] Internet-Draft ORIGIN Frames September 2016 Authors' Addresses Mark Nottingham Akamai Email: mnot@mnot.net URI: https://www.mnot.net/ Erik Nygren Akamai Email: nygren@akamai.com Nottingham & Nygren Expires April 1, 2017 [Page 6]