RFC 1945
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0
11. Access Authentication HTTP provides a simple challenge-response authentication mechanism which may be used by a server to challenge a client request and by a client to provide authentication information. It uses an extensible, case-insensitive token to identify the authentication scheme, followed by a comma-separated list of attribute-value pairs which carry the parameters necessary for achieving authentication via that scheme. auth-scheme = token auth-param = token "=" quoted-string The 401 (unauthorized) response message is used by an origin server to challenge the authorization of a user agent. This response must include a WWW-Authenticate header field containing at least one challenge applicable to the requested resource. challenge = auth-scheme 1*SP realm *( "," auth-param ) realm = "realm" "=" realm-value realm-value = quoted-string The realm attribute (case-insensitive) is required for all authentication schemes which issue a challenge. The realm value (case-sensitive), in combination with the canonical root URL of the server being accessed, defines the protection space. These realms allow the protected resources on a server to be partitioned into a set of protection spaces, each with its own authentication scheme and/or authorization database. The realm value is a string, generally assigned by the origin server, which may have additional semantics specific to the authentication scheme. A user agent that wishes to authenticate itself with a server-- usually, but not necessarily, after receiving a 401 response--may do so by including an Authorization header field with the request. The Authorization field value consists of credentials containing the authentication information of the user agent for the realm of the resource being requested. credentials = basic-credentials | ( auth-scheme #auth-param ) The domain over which credentials can be automatically applied by a user agent is determined by the protection space. If a prior request has been authorized, the same credentials may be reused for all other requests within that protection space for a period of time determined
by the authentication scheme, parameters, and/or user preference. Unless otherwise defined by the authentication scheme, a single protection space cannot extend outside the scope of its server. If the server does not wish to accept the credentials sent with a request, it should return a 403 (forbidden) response. The HTTP protocol does not restrict applications to this simple challenge-response mechanism for access authentication. Additional mechanisms may be used, such as encryption at the transport level or via message encapsulation, and with additional header fields specifying authentication information. However, these additional mechanisms are not defined by this specification. Proxies must be completely transparent regarding user agent authentication. That is, they must forward the WWW-Authenticate and Authorization headers untouched, and must not cache the response to a request containing Authorization. HTTP/1.0 does not provide a means for a client to be authenticated with a proxy. 11.1 Basic Authentication Scheme The "basic" authentication scheme is based on the model that the user agent must authenticate itself with a user-ID and a password for each realm. The realm value should be considered an opaque string which can only be compared for equality with other realms on that server. The server will authorize the request only if it can validate the user-ID and password for the protection space of the Request-URI. There are no optional authentication parameters. Upon receipt of an unauthorized request for a URI within the protection space, the server should respond with a challenge like the following: WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="WallyWorld" where "WallyWorld" is the string assigned by the server to identify the protection space of the Request-URI. To receive authorization, the client sends the user-ID and password, separated by a single colon (":") character, within a base64 [5] encoded string in the credentials. basic-credentials = "Basic" SP basic-cookie basic-cookie = <base64 [5] encoding of userid-password, except not limited to 76 char/line>
userid-password = [ token ] ":" *TEXT
If the user agent wishes to send the user-ID "Aladdin" and password
"open sesame", it would use the following header field:
Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==
The basic authentication scheme is a non-secure method of filtering
unauthorized access to resources on an HTTP server. It is based on
the assumption that the connection between the client and the server
can be regarded as a trusted carrier. As this is not generally true
on an open network, the basic authentication scheme should be used
accordingly. In spite of this, clients should implement the scheme in
order to communicate with servers that use it.
12. Security Considerations
This section is meant to inform application developers, information
providers, and users of the security limitations in HTTP/1.0 as
described by this document. The discussion does not include
definitive solutions to the problems revealed, though it does make
some suggestions for reducing security risks.
12.1 Authentication of Clients
As mentioned in Section 11.1, the Basic authentication scheme is not
a secure method of user authentication, nor does it prevent the
Entity-Body from being transmitted in clear text across the physical
network used as the carrier. HTTP/1.0 does not prevent additional
authentication schemes and encryption mechanisms from being employed
to increase security.
12.2 Safe Methods
The writers of client software should be aware that the software
represents the user in their interactions over the Internet, and
should be careful to allow the user to be aware of any actions they
may take which may have an unexpected significance to themselves or
others.
In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and
HEAD methods should never have the significance of taking an action
other than retrieval. These methods should be considered "safe." This
allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, in a
special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a
possibly unsafe action is being requested.
Naturally, it is not possible to ensure that the server does not generate side-effects as a result of performing a GET request; in fact, some dynamic resources consider that a feature. The important distinction here is that the user did not request the side-effects, so therefore cannot be held accountable for them. 12.3 Abuse of Server Log Information A server is in the position to save personal data about a user's requests which may identify their reading patterns or subjects of interest. This information is clearly confidential in nature and its handling may be constrained by law in certain countries. People using the HTTP protocol to provide data are responsible for ensuring that such material is not distributed without the permission of any individuals that are identifiable by the published results. 12.4 Transfer of Sensitive Information Like any generic data transfer protocol, HTTP cannot regulate the content of the data that is transferred, nor is there any a priori method of determining the sensitivity of any particular piece of information within the context of any given request. Therefore, applications should supply as much control over this information as possible to the provider of that information. Three header fields are worth special mention in this context: Server, Referer and From. Revealing the specific software version of the server may allow the server machine to become more vulnerable to attacks against software that is known to contain security holes. Implementors should make the Server header field a configurable option. The Referer field allows reading patterns to be studied and reverse links drawn. Although it can be very useful, its power can be abused if user details are not separated from the information contained in the Referer. Even when the personal information has been removed, the Referer field may indicate a private document's URI whose publication would be inappropriate. The information sent in the From field might conflict with the user's privacy interests or their site's security policy, and hence it should not be transmitted without the user being able to disable, enable, and modify the contents of the field. The user must be able to set the contents of this field within a user preference or application defaults configuration. We suggest, though do not require, that a convenient toggle interface be provided for the user to enable or disable the sending of From and Referer information.
12.5 Attacks Based On File and Path Names Implementations of HTTP origin servers should be careful to restrict the documents returned by HTTP requests to be only those that were intended by the server administrators. If an HTTP server translates HTTP URIs directly into file system calls, the server must take special care not to serve files that were not intended to be delivered to HTTP clients. For example, Unix, Microsoft Windows, and other operating systems use ".." as a path component to indicate a directory level above the current one. On such a system, an HTTP server must disallow any such construct in the Request-URI if it would otherwise allow access to a resource outside those intended to be accessible via the HTTP server. Similarly, files intended for reference only internally to the server (such as access control files, configuration files, and script code) must be protected from inappropriate retrieval, since they might contain sensitive information. Experience has shown that minor bugs in such HTTP server implementations have turned into security risks. 13. Acknowledgments This specification makes heavy use of the augmented BNF and generic constructs defined by David H. Crocker for RFC 822 [7]. Similarly, it reuses many of the definitions provided by Nathaniel Borenstein and Ned Freed for MIME [5]. We hope that their inclusion in this specification will help reduce past confusion over the relationship between HTTP/1.0 and Internet mail message formats. The HTTP protocol has evolved considerably over the past four years. It has benefited from a large and active developer community--the many people who have participated on the www-talk mailing list--and it is that community which has been most responsible for the success of HTTP and of the World-Wide Web in general. Marc Andreessen, Robert Cailliau, Daniel W. Connolly, Bob Denny, Jean-Francois Groff, Phillip M. Hallam-Baker, Hakon W. Lie, Ari Luotonen, Rob McCool, Lou Montulli, Dave Raggett, Tony Sanders, and Marc VanHeyningen deserve special recognition for their efforts in defining aspects of the protocol for early versions of this specification. Paul Hoffman contributed sections regarding the informational status of this document and Appendices C and D.
This document has benefited greatly from the comments of all those
participating in the HTTP-WG. In addition to those already mentioned,
the following individuals have contributed to this specification:
Gary Adams Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Keith Ball Brian Behlendorf
Paul Burchard Maurizio Codogno
Mike Cowlishaw Roman Czyborra
Michael A. Dolan John Franks
Jim Gettys Marc Hedlund
Koen Holtman Alex Hopmann
Bob Jernigan Shel Kaphan
Martijn Koster Dave Kristol
Daniel LaLiberte Paul Leach
Albert Lunde John C. Mallery
Larry Masinter Mitra
Jeffrey Mogul Gavin Nicol
Bill Perry Jeffrey Perry
Owen Rees Luigi Rizzo
David Robinson Marc Salomon
Rich Salz Jim Seidman
Chuck Shotton Eric W. Sink
Simon E. Spero Robert S. Thau
Francois Yergeau Mary Ellen Zurko
Jean-Philippe Martin-Flatin
14. References
[1] Anklesaria, F., McCahill, M., Lindner, P., Johnson, D.,
Torrey, D., and B. Alberti, "The Internet Gopher Protocol: A
Distributed Document Search and Retrieval Protocol", RFC 1436,
University of Minnesota, March 1993.
[2] Berners-Lee, T., "Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW: A
Unifying Syntax for the Expression of Names and Addresses of
Objects on the Network as used in the World-Wide Web",
RFC 1630, CERN, June 1994.
[3] Berners-Lee, T., and D. Connolly, "Hypertext Markup Language -
2.0", RFC 1866, MIT/W3C, November 1995.
[4] Berners-Lee, T., Masinter, L., and M. McCahill, "Uniform
Resource Locators (URL)", RFC 1738, CERN, Xerox PARC,
University of Minnesota, December 1994.
[5] Borenstein, N., and N. Freed, "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC 1521, Bellcore, Innosoft, September 1993. [6] Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet hosts - Application and Support", STD 3, RFC 1123, IETF, October 1989. [7] Crocker, D., "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages", STD 11, RFC 822, UDEL, August 1982. [8] F. Davis, B. Kahle, H. Morris, J. Salem, T. Shen, R. Wang, J. Sui, and M. Grinbaum. "WAIS Interface Protocol Prototype Functional Specification." (v1.5), Thinking Machines Corporation, April 1990. [9] Fielding, R., "Relative Uniform Resource Locators", RFC 1808, UC Irvine, June 1995. [10] Horton, M., and R. Adams, "Standard for interchange of USENET Messages", RFC 1036 (Obsoletes RFC 850), AT&T Bell Laboratories, Center for Seismic Studies, December 1987. [11] Kantor, B., and P. Lapsley, "Network News Transfer Protocol: A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News", RFC 977, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, February 1986. [12] Postel, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol." STD 10, RFC 821, USC/ISI, August 1982. [13] Postel, J., "Media Type Registration Procedure." RFC 1590, USC/ISI, March 1994. [14] Postel, J., and J. Reynolds, "File Transfer Protocol (FTP)", STD 9, RFC 959, USC/ISI, October 1985. [15] Reynolds, J., and J. Postel, "Assigned Numbers", STD 2, RFC 1700, USC/ISI, October 1994. [16] Sollins, K., and L. Masinter, "Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names", RFC 1737, MIT/LCS, Xerox Corporation, December 1994. [17] US-ASCII. Coded Character Set - 7-Bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Standard ANSI X3.4-1986, ANSI, 1986.
[18] ISO-8859. International Standard -- Information Processing -- 8-bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets -- Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1, ISO 8859-1:1987. Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, ISO 8859-2, 1987. Part 3: Latin alphabet No. 3, ISO 8859-3, 1988. Part 4: Latin alphabet No. 4, ISO 8859-4, 1988. Part 5: Latin/Cyrillic alphabet, ISO 8859-5, 1988. Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, ISO 8859-6, 1987. Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet, ISO 8859-7, 1987. Part 8: Latin/Hebrew alphabet, ISO 8859-8, 1988. Part 9: Latin alphabet No. 5, ISO 8859-9, 1990. 15. Authors' Addresses Tim Berners-Lee Director, W3 Consortium MIT Laboratory for Computer Science 545 Technology Square Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. Fax: +1 (617) 258 8682 EMail: timbl@w3.org Roy T. Fielding Department of Information and Computer Science University of California Irvine, CA 92717-3425, U.S.A. Fax: +1 (714) 824-4056 EMail: fielding@ics.uci.edu Henrik Frystyk Nielsen W3 Consortium MIT Laboratory for Computer Science 545 Technology Square Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. Fax: +1 (617) 258 8682 EMail: frystyk@w3.org
Appendices These appendices are provided for informational reasons only -- they do not form a part of the HTTP/1.0 specification. A. Internet Media Type message/http In addition to defining the HTTP/1.0 protocol, this document serves as the specification for the Internet media type "message/http". The following is to be registered with IANA [13]. Media Type name: message Media subtype name: http Required parameters: none Optional parameters: version, msgtype version: The HTTP-Version number of the enclosed message (e.g., "1.0"). If not present, the version can be determined from the first line of the body. msgtype: The message type -- "request" or "response". If not present, the type can be determined from the first line of the body. Encoding considerations: only "7bit", "8bit", or "binary" are permitted Security considerations: none B. Tolerant Applications Although this document specifies the requirements for the generation of HTTP/1.0 messages, not all applications will be correct in their implementation. We therefore recommend that operational applications be tolerant of deviations whenever those deviations can be interpreted unambiguously. Clients should be tolerant in parsing the Status-Line and servers tolerant when parsing the Request-Line. In particular, they should accept any amount of SP or HT characters between fields, even though only a single SP is required. The line terminator for HTTP-header fields is the sequence CRLF. However, we recommend that applications, when parsing such headers, recognize a single LF as a line terminator and ignore the leading CR.
C. Relationship to MIME HTTP/1.0 uses many of the constructs defined for Internet Mail (RFC 822 [7]) and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME [5]) to allow entities to be transmitted in an open variety of representations and with extensible mechanisms. However, RFC 1521 discusses mail, and HTTP has a few features that are different than those described in RFC 1521. These differences were carefully chosen to optimize performance over binary connections, to allow greater freedom in the use of new media types, to make date comparisons easier, and to acknowledge the practice of some early HTTP servers and clients. At the time of this writing, it is expected that RFC 1521 will be revised. The revisions may include some of the practices found in HTTP/1.0 but not in RFC 1521. This appendix describes specific areas where HTTP differs from RFC 1521. Proxies and gateways to strict MIME environments should be aware of these differences and provide the appropriate conversions where necessary. Proxies and gateways from MIME environments to HTTP also need to be aware of the differences because some conversions may be required. C.1 Conversion to Canonical Form RFC 1521 requires that an Internet mail entity be converted to canonical form prior to being transferred, as described in Appendix G of RFC 1521 [5]. Section 3.6.1 of this document describes the forms allowed for subtypes of the "text" media type when transmitted over HTTP. RFC 1521 requires that content with a Content-Type of "text" represent line breaks as CRLF and forbids the use of CR or LF outside of line break sequences. HTTP allows CRLF, bare CR, and bare LF to indicate a line break within text content when a message is transmitted over HTTP. Where it is possible, a proxy or gateway from HTTP to a strict RFC 1521 environment should translate all line breaks within the text media types described in Section 3.6.1 of this document to the RFC 1521 canonical form of CRLF. Note, however, that this may be complicated by the presence of a Content-Encoding and by the fact that HTTP allows the use of some character sets which do not use octets 13 and 10 to represent CR and LF, as is the case for some multi-byte character sets.
C.2 Conversion of Date Formats HTTP/1.0 uses a restricted set of date formats (Section 3.3) to simplify the process of date comparison. Proxies and gateways from other protocols should ensure that any Date header field present in a message conforms to one of the HTTP/1.0 formats and rewrite the date if necessary. C.3 Introduction of Content-Encoding RFC 1521 does not include any concept equivalent to HTTP/1.0's Content-Encoding header field. Since this acts as a modifier on the media type, proxies and gateways from HTTP to MIME-compliant protocols must either change the value of the Content-Type header field or decode the Entity-Body before forwarding the message. (Some experimental applications of Content-Type for Internet mail have used a media-type parameter of ";conversions=<content-coding>" to perform an equivalent function as Content-Encoding. However, this parameter is not part of RFC 1521.) C.4 No Content-Transfer-Encoding HTTP does not use the Content-Transfer-Encoding (CTE) field of RFC 1521. Proxies and gateways from MIME-compliant protocols to HTTP must remove any non-identity CTE ("quoted-printable" or "base64") encoding prior to delivering the response message to an HTTP client. Proxies and gateways from HTTP to MIME-compliant protocols are responsible for ensuring that the message is in the correct format and encoding for safe transport on that protocol, where "safe transport" is defined by the limitations of the protocol being used. Such a proxy or gateway should label the data with an appropriate Content-Transfer-Encoding if doing so will improve the likelihood of safe transport over the destination protocol. C.5 HTTP Header Fields in Multipart Body-Parts In RFC 1521, most header fields in multipart body-parts are generally ignored unless the field name begins with "Content-". In HTTP/1.0, multipart body-parts may contain any HTTP header fields which are significant to the meaning of that part. D. Additional Features This appendix documents protocol elements used by some existing HTTP implementations, but not consistently and correctly across most HTTP/1.0 applications. Implementors should be aware of these features, but cannot rely upon their presence in, or interoperability
with, other HTTP/1.0 applications. D.1 Additional Request Methods D.1.1 PUT The PUT method requests that the enclosed entity be stored under the supplied Request-URI. If the Request-URI refers to an already existing resource, the enclosed entity should be considered as a modified version of the one residing on the origin server. If the Request-URI does not point to an existing resource, and that URI is capable of being defined as a new resource by the requesting user agent, the origin server can create the resource with that URI. The fundamental difference between the POST and PUT requests is reflected in the different meaning of the Request-URI. The URI in a POST request identifies the resource that will handle the enclosed entity as data to be processed. That resource may be a data-accepting process, a gateway to some other protocol, or a separate entity that accepts annotations. In contrast, the URI in a PUT request identifies the entity enclosed with the request -- the user agent knows what URI is intended and the server should not apply the request to some other resource. D.1.2 DELETE The DELETE method requests that the origin server delete the resource identified by the Request-URI. D.1.3 LINK The LINK method establishes one or more Link relationships between the existing resource identified by the Request-URI and other existing resources. D.1.4 UNLINK The UNLINK method removes one or more Link relationships from the existing resource identified by the Request-URI. D.2 Additional Header Field Definitions D.2.1 Accept The Accept request-header field can be used to indicate a list of media ranges which are acceptable as a response to the request. The asterisk "*" character is used to group media types into ranges, with "*/*" indicating all media types and "type/*" indicating all subtypes
of that type. The set of ranges given by the client should represent what types are acceptable given the context of the request. D.2.2 Accept-Charset The Accept-Charset request-header field can be used to indicate a list of preferred character sets other than the default US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1. This field allows clients capable of understanding more comprehensive or special-purpose character sets to signal that capability to a server which is capable of representing documents in those character sets. D.2.3 Accept-Encoding The Accept-Encoding request-header field is similar to Accept, but restricts the content-coding values which are acceptable in the response. D.2.4 Accept-Language The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a response to the request. D.2.5 Content-Language The Content-Language entity-header field describes the natural language(s) of the intended audience for the enclosed entity. Note that this may not be equivalent to all the languages used within the entity. D.2.6 Link The Link entity-header field provides a means for describing a relationship between the entity and some other resource. An entity may include multiple Link values. Links at the metainformation level typically indicate relationships like hierarchical structure and navigation paths. D.2.7 MIME-Version HTTP messages may include a single MIME-Version general-header field to indicate what version of the MIME protocol was used to construct the message. Use of the MIME-Version header field, as defined by RFC 1521 [5], should indicate that the message is MIME-conformant. Unfortunately, some older HTTP/1.0 servers send it indiscriminately, and thus this field should be ignored.
D.2.8 Retry-After The Retry-After response-header field can be used with a 503 (service unavailable) response to indicate how long the service is expected to be unavailable to the requesting client. The value of this field can be either an HTTP-date or an integer number of seconds (in decimal) after the time of the response. D.2.9 Title The Title entity-header field indicates the title of the entity. D.2.10 URI The URI entity-header field may contain some or all of the Uniform Resource Identifiers (Section 3.2) by which the Request-URI resource can be identified. There is no guarantee that the resource can be accessed using the URI(s) specified.