| HTTPbis Working Group | R. Peon |
| Internet-Draft | Google, Inc |
| Intended status: Informational | H. Ruellan |
| Expires: February 28, 2014 | Canon CRF |
| August 27, 2013 |
HPACK - Header Compression for HTTP/2.0
draft-ietf-httpbis-header-compression-03
This document describes HPACK, a format adapted to efficiently represent HTTP headers in the context of HTTP/2.0.
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 February 28, 2014.
Copyright (c) 2013 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.
This document describes HPACK, a format adapted to efficiently represent HTTP headers in the context of HTTP/2.0.
In HTTP/1.X, headers are sent without any form of compression. As web pages have grown to include dozens to hundreds of requests, the redundant headers in these requests now pose a problem of measurable latency and unnecessary bandwidth. 1 [PERF1] 2 [PERF2]
SPDY [SPDY] initially addressed this redundancy by compressing headers with Deflate, which proved very effective at eliminating the redundant headers. However, that aproach exposed a security risk as demonstrated by the CRIME [CRIME].
In this document, we propose a new header compressor which eliminates the redundant headers, is not vulnerable to the CRIME style attack, and which also has a bounded memory cost for use in small constrained environments.
The HTTP header encoding described in this document is based on a header table that map (name, value) pairs to index values. Header tables are incrementally updated during the HTTP/2.0 session.
The encoder is responsible for deciding which headers to insert as new entries in the header table. The decoder then does exactly what the encoder prescribes, ending in a state that exactly matches the encoder's state. This enables decoders to remain simple and understand a wide variety of encoders.
As two consecutive sets of headers often have headers in common, each set of headers is coded as a difference from the previous set of headers. The goal is to only encode the changes (headers present in one of the set and not in the other) between the two sets of headers.
An example illustrating the use of these different mechanisms to represent headers is available in Appendix C.
The encoding and decoding of headers relies on some components and concepts. The set of components used form an encoding context.
The set of components used to encode or decode a header set form an encoding context: an encoding context contains a header table and a reference set.
Using HTTP, messages are exchanged between a client and a server in both direction. To keep the encoding of headers in each direction independent from the other direction, there is one encoding context for each direction.
The headers contained in a PUSH_PROMISE frame sent by a server to a client are encoded within the same context as the headers contained in the HEADERS frame corresponding to a response sent from the server to the client.
A header table consists of an ordered list of (name, value) pairs. The first entry of a header table is assigned the index 0.
A header can be represented by an entry from the header table. Rather than encoding a literal value for the header field name and value, the encoder can select an entry from the header table.
Literal header names MUST be translated to lowercase before encoding and transmission. This enables an encoder to perform direct bitwise comparisons on names and values when determining if an entry already exists in the header table.
There is no need for the header table to contain duplicate entries. However, duplicate entries MUST NOT be treated as an error by a decoder.
Initially, a header table contains a list of common headers. Two initial lists of header are provided in Appendix B. One list is for headers transmitted from a client to a server, the other for the reverse direction.
A header table is modified by either adding a new entry at the end of the table, or by replacing an existing entry.
The encoder decides how to update the header table and as such can control how much memory is used by the header table. To limit the memory requirements on the decoder side, the header table size is bounded (see the SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE in Section 5).
The size of an entry is the sum of its name's length in bytes (as defined in Section 4.1.2), of its value's length in bytes (Section 4.1.3) and of 32 bytes. The 32 bytes are an accounting for the entry structure overhead. For example, an entry structure using two 64-bits pointers to reference the name and the value and the entry, and two 64-bits integer for counting the number of references to these name and value would use 32 bytes.
The size of a header table is the sum of the size of its entries.
A reference set is defined as an unordered set of references to entries of the header table.
The initial reference set is the empty set.
The reference set is updated during the processing of a set of headers.
Using the differential encoding, a header that is not present in the reference set can be encoded either with an indexed representation (if the header is present in the header table), or with a literal representation (if the header is not present in the header table).
A header that is to be removed from the reference set is encoded with an indexed representation.
A header set is a group of header fields that are encoded as a whole. Each header field is a (name, value) pair.
A header set is encoded using an ordered list of zero or more header representations. All the header representations describing a header set a grouped into a header block.
A header can be represented either as a literal or as an index.
The emission of header is the process of adding a header to the current set of headers. Once an header is emitted, it can't be removed from the current set of headers.
The concept of header emission allows a decoder to know when it can pass a header safely to a higher level on the receiver side. This allows a decoder to be implemented in a streaming way, and as such to only keep in memory the header table and the reference set. With such an implementation, the amount of memory used by the decoder is bounded, even in presence of a very large set of headers. The management of memory for handling very large sets of headers can therefore be deferred to the application, which may be able to emit the header to the wire and thus free up memory quickly.
The processing of an encoded header set to obtain a list of headers is defined in this section. To ensure a correct decoding of a header set, a decoder MUST obey the following rules.
All the header representations contained in a header block are processed in the order in which they are presented, as specified below.
An indexed representation corresponding to an entry not present in the reference set entails the following actions:
An indexed representation corresponding to an entry present in the reference set entails the following actions:
A literal representation that is not added to the header table entails the following action:
A literal representation that is added to the header table entails the following actions:
Once all the representations contained in a header block have been processed, the headers that are in common with the previous header set are emitted, during the reference set emission.
For the reference set emission, each header contained in the reference set that has not been emitted during the processing of the header block is emitted.
Once all of the header representations have been processed, and the remaining items in the reference set have been emitted, the header set is complete.
The header table can be modified by either adding a new entry to it or by replacing an existing one. Before doing such a modification, it has to be ensured that the header table size will stay lower than or equal to the SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE limit (see Section 5). To achieve this, repeatedly, the first entry of the header table is removed, until enough space is available for the modification.
A consequence of removing one or more entries at the beginning of the header table is that the remaining entries are renumbered. The first entry of the header table is always associated to the index 0.
When the modification of the header table is the replacement of an existing entry, the replaced entry is the one indicated in the literal representation before any entry is removed from the header table. If the entry to be replaced is removed from the header table when performing the size adjustment, the replacement entry is inserted at the beginning of the header table.
The addition of a new entry with a size greater than the SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE limit causes all the entries from the header table to be dropped and the new entry not to be added to the header table. The replacement of an existing entry with a new entry with a size greater than the SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE has the same consequences.
Integers are used to represent name indexes, pair indexes or string lengths. To allow for optimized processing, an integer representation always finishes at the end of a byte.
An integer is represented in two parts: a prefix that fills the current byte and an optional list of bytes that are used if the integer value does not fit in the prefix. The number of bits of the prefix (called N) is a parameter of the integer representation.
The N-bit prefix allows filling the current byte. If the value is small enough (strictly less than 2^N-1), it is encoded within the N-bit prefix. Otherwise all the bits of the prefix are set to 1 and the value is encoded using an unsigned variable length integer representation.
If I < 2^N - 1, encode I on N bits
Else
encode 2^N - 1 on N bits
I = I - (2^N - 1)
While I >= 128
Encode (I % 128 + 128) on 8 bits
I = I / 128
encode (I) on 8 bits
The algorithm to represent an integer I is as follows:
The value 10 is to be encoded with a 5-bit prefix.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | X | X | X | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 10 stored on 5 bits +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
The value I=1337 is to be encoded with a 5-bit prefix.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | X | X | X | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Prefix = 31, I = 1306 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1306>=128, encode(154), I = 1306/128 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 10<128, encode(10), done +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
Header names are sequences of ASCII characters that MUST conform to the following header-name ABNF construction:
LOWERALPHA = %x61-7A
header-char = "!" / "#" / "$" / "%" / "&" / "'" /
"*" / "+" / "-" / "." / "^" / "_" /
"`" / "|" / "~" / DIGIT / LOWERALPHA
header-name = [":"] 1*header-char
They are encoded in two parts:
Header values are encoded as sequences of UTF-8 encoded text. They are encoded in two parts:
Invalid UTF-8 octet sequences, "over-long" UTF-8 encodings, and UTF-8 octets that represent invalid Unicode Codepoints MUST NOT be used.
An indexed header representation identifies an entry in the header table. The entry is emitted and added to the reference set if it is not currently in the reference set. The entry is removed from the reference set if it is present in the reference set.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | 1 | Index (7+) | +---+---------------------------+
Indexed Header
This representation starts with the '1' 1-bit pattern, followed by the index of the matching pair, represented as an integer with a 7-bit prefix.
Literal header representations contain a literal header field value. Header field names are either provided as a literal or by reference to an existing header table entry.
Literal representations all result in the emission of a header when decoded.
An literal header without indexing causes the emission of a header without altering the header table.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | 0 | 1 | 1 | Index (5+) | +---+---+---+-------------------+ | Value Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+
Literal Header without Indexing - Indexed Name
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | +---+---+---+-------------------+ | Name Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Name String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+ | Value Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+
Literal Header without Indexing - New Name
This representation starts with the '011' 3-bit pattern.
If the header name matches the header name of a (name, value) pair stored in the Header Table, the index of the pair increased by one (index + 1) is represented as an integer with a 5-bit prefix. Note that if the index is strictly below 31, one byte is used.
If the header name does not match a header name entry, the value 0 is represented on 5 bits followed by the header name (Section 4.1.2).
Header name representation is followed by the header value represented as a literal string as described in Section 4.1.3.
A literal header with incremental indexing adds a new entry to the header table.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | 0 | 1 | 0 | Index (5+) | +---+---+---+-------------------+ | Value Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+
Literal Header with Incremental Indexing - Indexed Name
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | +---+---+---+-------------------+ | Name Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Name String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+ | Value Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+
Literal Header with Incremental Indexing - New Name
This representation starts with the '010' 3-bit pattern.
If the header name matches the header name of a (name, value) pair stored in the Header Table, the index of the pair increased by one (index + 1) is represented as an integer with a 5-bit prefix. Note that if the index is strictly below 31, one byte is used.
If the header name does not match a header name entry, the value 0 is represented on 5 bits followed by the header name (Section 4.1.2).
Header name representation is followed by the header value represented as a literal string as described in Section 4.1.3.
A literal header with substitution indexing replaces an existing header table entry.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | 0 | 0 | Index (6+) | +---+---+-----------------------+ | Substituted Index (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+
Literal Header with Substitution Indexing - Indexed Name
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | 0 | 0 | 0 | +---+---+-----------------------+ | Name Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Name String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+ | Substituted Index (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value Length (8+) | +-------------------------------+ | Value String (Length octets) | +-------------------------------+
Literal Header with Substitution Indexing - New Name
This representation starts with the '00' 2-bit pattern.
If the header name matches the header name of a (name, value) pair stored in the Header Table, the index of the pair increased by one (index + 1) is represented as an integer with a 6-bit prefix. Note that if the index is strictly below 63, one byte is used.
If the header name does not match a header name entry, the value 0 is represented on 6 bits followed by the header name (Section 4.1.2).
The index of the substituted (name, value) pair is inserted after the header name representation as a 0-bit prefix integer.
The index of the substituted pair MUST correspond to a position in the header table containing a non-void entry. An index for the substituted pair that corresponds to empty position in the header table MUST be treated as an error.
This index is followed by the header value represented as a literal string as described in Section 4.1.3.
A few parameters can be used to accommodate client and server processing and memory requirements.
This compressor exists to solve security issues present in stream compressors such as DEFLATE whereby the compression context can be efficiently probed to reveal secrets. A conformant implementation of this specification should be fairly safe against that kind of attack, as the reaping of any information from the compression context requires more work than guessing and verifying the plaintext data directly with the server. As with any secret, however, the longer the length of the secret, the more difficult the secret is to guess. It is inadvisable to have short cookies that are relied upon to remain secret for any duration of time.
A proper security-conscious implementation will also need to prevent timing attacks by ensuring that the amount of time it takes to do string comparisons is always a function of the total length of the strings, and not a function of the number of matched characters.
Another common security problem is when the remote endpoint successfully causes the local endpoint to exhaust its memory. This compressor attempts to deal with the most obvious ways that this could occur by limiting both the peak and the steady-state amount of memory consumed in the compressor state, by providing ways for the application to consume/flush the emitted headers in small chunks, and by considering overhead in the state size calculation. Implementors must still be careful in the creation of APIs to an implementation of this compressor by ensuring that header keys and values are either emitted as a stream, or that the compression implementation have a limit on the maximum size of a key or value. Failure to implement these kinds of safeguards may still result in a scenario where the local endpoint exhausts its memory.
This document registers the SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE setting in the "HTTP/2.0 Settings" registry established by [HTTP2]. The assigned code for this setting is TBD.
| [HTTP2] | Belshe, M., Peon, R., Thomson, M. and A. Melnikov, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol version 2.0", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-06, February 2013. |
| [SPDY] | Belshe, M. and R. Peon, "SPDY Protocol", February 2012. |
| [CRIME] | Rizzo, J. and T. Duong, "The Crime Attack", September 2012. |
| [PERF1] | Belshe, M., "IETF83: SPDY and What to Consider for HTTP/2.0", March 2012. |
| [PERF2] | McManus, P., "SPDY What I Like About You", September 2011. |
The following table lists the pre-defined headers that make-up the initial header table user to represent requests sent from a client to a server.
| Index | Header Name | Header Value |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | :scheme | http |
| 1 | :scheme | https |
| 2 | :host | |
| 3 | :path | / |
| 4 | :method | GET |
| 5 | accept | |
| 6 | accept-charset | |
| 7 | accept-encoding | |
| 8 | accept-language | |
| 9 | cookie | |
| 10 | if-modified-since | |
| 11 | user-agent | |
| 12 | referer | |
| 13 | authorization | |
| 14 | allow | |
| 15 | cache-control | |
| 16 | connection | |
| 17 | content-length | |
| 18 | content-type | |
| 19 | date | |
| 20 | expect | |
| 21 | from | |
| 22 | if-match | |
| 23 | if-none-match | |
| 24 | if-range | |
| 25 | if-unmodified-since | |
| 26 | max-forwards | |
| 27 | proxy-authorization | |
| 28 | range | |
| 29 | via |
The following table lists the pre-defined headers that make-up the initial header table used to represent responses sent from a server to a client. The same header table is also used to represent request headers sent from a server to a client in a PUSH_PROMISE frame.
| Index | Header Name | Header Value |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | :status | 200 |
| 1 | age | |
| 2 | cache-control | |
| 3 | content-length | |
| 4 | content-type | |
| 5 | date | |
| 6 | etag | |
| 7 | expires | |
| 8 | last-modified | |
| 9 | server | |
| 10 | set-cookie | |
| 11 | vary | |
| 12 | via | |
| 13 | access-control-allow-origin | |
| 14 | accept-ranges | |
| 15 | allow | |
| 16 | connection | |
| 17 | content-disposition | |
| 18 | content-encoding | |
| 19 | content-language | |
| 20 | content-location | |
| 21 | content-range | |
| 22 | link | |
| 23 | location | |
| 24 | proxy-authenticate | |
| 25 | refresh | |
| 26 | retry-after | |
| 27 | strict-transport-security | |
| 28 | transfer-encoding | |
| 29 | www-authenticate |
Here is an example that illustrates different representations and how tables are updated.
:path: /my-example/index.html user-agent: my-user-agent mynewheader: first
0x44 (literal header with incremental indexing, name index = 3) 0x16 (header value string length = 22) /my-example/index.html 0x4D (literal header with incremental indexing, name index = 12) 0x0D (header value string length = 13) my-user-agent 0x40 (literal header with incremental indexing, new name) 0x0B (header name string length = 11) mynewheader 0x05 (header value string length = 5) first
Header table +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | Index | Header Name | Header Value | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 0 | :scheme | http | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 1 | :scheme | https | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | ... | ... | ... | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 37 | warning | | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 38 | :path | /my-example/index.html | added header +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 39 | user-agent | my-user-agent | added header +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 40 | mynewheader | first | added header +---------+----------------+---------------------------+
Reference Set: :path, /my-example/index.html user-agent, my-user-agent mynewheader, first
The first header set to represent is the following:
:path: /my-example/resources/script.js user-agent: my-user-agent mynewheader: second
0xa6 (indexed header, index = 38: removal from reference set) 0xa8 (indexed header, index = 40: removal from reference set) 0x04 (literal header, substitution indexing, name index = 3) 0x26 (replaced entry index = 38) 0x1f (header value string length = 31) /my-example/resources/script.js 0x5f 0x0a (literal header, incremental indexing, name index = 40) 0x06 (header value string length = 6) second
Header table +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | Index | Header Name | Header Value | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 0 | :scheme | http | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 1 | :scheme | https | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | ... | ... | ... | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 37 | warning | | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 38 | :path | /my-example/resources/ | replaced | | | script.js | header +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 39 | user-agent | my-user-agent | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 40 | mynewheader | first | +---------+----------------+---------------------------+ | 41 | mynewheader | second | added header +---------+----------------+---------------------------+
Reference Set: :path, /my-example/resources/script.js user-agent, my-user-agent mynewheader, second
The second header set to represent is the following: