HTTP Working Group I. Grigorik
Internet-Draft Y. Weiss
Intended status: Experimental Google
Expires: September 12, 2020 March 11, 2020
HTTP Client Hints
draft-ietf-httpbis-client-hints-11
Abstract
HTTP defines proactive content negotiation to allow servers to select
the appropriate response for a given request, based upon the user
agent's characteristics, as expressed in request headers. In
practice, clients are often unwilling to send those request headers,
because it is not clear whether they will be used, and sending them
impacts both performance and privacy.
This document defines an Accept-CH response header that servers can
use to advertise their use of request headers for proactive content
negotiation, along with a set of guidelines for the creation of such
headers, colloquially known as "Client Hints."
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/ [1].
Working Group information can be found at http://httpwg.github.io/
[2]; source code and issues list for this draft can be found at
https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/labels/client-hints [3].
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 https://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."
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This Internet-Draft will expire on September 12, 2020.
Copyright Notice
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Notational Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Client Hint Request Header Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. Sending Client Hints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. Server Processing of Client Hints . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Advertising Server Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. The Accept-CH Response Header Field . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2. Interaction with Caches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Information Exposure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2. Deployment and Security Risks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Abuse Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Cost of Sending Hints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1. Accept-CH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.1. Since -00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.2. Since -01 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.3. Since -02 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.4. Since -03 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.5. Since -04 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.6. Since -05 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.7. Since -06 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.8. Since -07 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.9. Since -08 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.10. Since -09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.11. Since -10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
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9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
9.3. URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1. Introduction
There are thousands of different devices accessing the web, each with
different device capabilities and preference information. These
device capabilities include hardware and software characteristics, as
well as dynamic user and client preferences. Historically,
applications that wanted to allow the server to optimize content
delivery and user experience based on such capabilities had to rely
on passive identification (e.g., by matching User-Agent
(Section 5.5.3 of [RFC7231]) header field against an established
database of client signatures), used HTTP cookies [RFC6265] and URL
parameters, or use some combination of these and similar mechanisms
to enable ad hoc content negotiation.
Such techniques are expensive to setup and maintain, and are not
portable across both applications and servers. They also make it
hard for both client and server to reason about which data is
required and is in use during the negotiation:
o User agent detection cannot reliably identify all static
variables, cannot infer dynamic client preferences, requires
external device database, is not cache friendly, and is reliant on
a passive fingerprinting surface.
o Cookie based approaches are not portable across applications and
servers, impose additional client-side latency by requiring
JavaScript execution, and are not cache friendly.
o URL parameters, similar to cookie based approaches, suffer from
lack of portability, and are hard to deploy due to a requirement
to encode content negotiation data inside of the URL of each
resource.
Proactive content negotiation (Section 3.4.1 of [RFC7231]) offers an
alternative approach; user agents use specified, well-defined request
headers to advertise their capabilities and characteristics, so that
servers can select (or formulate) an appropriate response.
However, traditional proactive content negotiation techniques often
mean that clients send these request headers prolifically. This
causes performance concerns (because it creates "bloat" in requests),
as well as privacy issues; passively providing such information
allows servers to silently fingerprint the user agent.
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This document defines a new response header, Accept-CH, that allows
an origin server to explicitly ask that clients send these headers in
requests. It also defines guidelines for content negotiation
mechanisms that use it, colloquially referred to as Client Hints.
Client Hints mitigate performance concerns by assuring that clients
will only send the request headers when they're actually going to be
used, and privacy concerns of passive fingerprinting by requiring
explicit opt-in and disclosure of required headers by the server
through the use of the Accept-CH response header.
This document defines Client Hints, a framework that enables servers
to opt-in to specific proactive content negotiation features,
adapting their content accordingly. However, it does not define any
specific features that will use that infrastructure. Those features
will be defined in their respective specifications.
One example of such a feature is the User Agent Client Hints feature
[UA-CH].
1.1. Notational Conventions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
This document uses the Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF) notation of
[RFC5234].
2. Client Hint Request Header Fields
A Client Hint request header field is a HTTP header field that is
used by HTTP clients to indicate data that can be used by the server
to select an appropriate response. Each one conveys client
preferences that the server can use to adapt and optimize the
response.
2.1. Sending Client Hints
Clients choose what Client Hints to send in a request based on their
default settings, user configuration, and server preferences
expressed in "Accept-CH". The client and server can use an opt-in
mechanism outlined below to negotiate which header fields need to be
sent to allow for efficient content adaption, and optionally use
additional mechanisms to negotiate delegation policies that control
access of third parties to same header fields.
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Implementers SHOULD be aware of the passive fingerprinting
implications when implementing support for Client Hints, and follow
the considerations outlined in the Security Considerations
(Section 4) section of this document.
2.2. Server Processing of Client Hints
When presented with a request that contains one or more client hint
header fields, servers can optimize the response based upon the
information in them. When doing so, and if the resource is
cacheable, the server MUST also generate a Vary response header field
(Section 7.1.4 of [RFC7231]) to indicate which hints can affect the
selected response and whether the selected response is appropriate
for a later request.
Furthermore, the server can generate additional response header
fields (as specified by the hint or hints in use) that convey related
values to aid client processing.
3. Advertising Server Support
Servers can advertise support for Client Hints using the mechanism
described below.
3.1. The Accept-CH Response Header Field
The Accept-CH response header field indicates server support for the
hints indicated in its value.
Accept-CH is a Structured Header [I-D.ietf-httpbis-header-structure].
Its value MUST be an sh-list (Section 3.1 of
[I-D.ietf-httpbis-header-structure]) whose members are tokens
(Section 3.3.4 of [I-D.ietf-httpbis-header-structure]). Its ABNF is:
Accept-CH = sh-list
For example:
Accept-CH: Sec-CH-Example, Sec-CH-Example-2
When a client receives an HTTP response containing "Accept-CH", it
indicates that the origin opts-in to receive the indicated request
header fields for subsequent same-origin requests. The opt-in MUST
be ignored if delivered over non-secure transport or for an origin
with a scheme different from HTTPS. It SHOULD be persisted and bound
to the origin to enable delivery of Client Hints on subsequent
requests to the server's origin.
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For example:
Accept-CH: Sec-CH-Example, Sec-CH-Example-2
Accept-CH: Sec-CH-Example-3
Based on the Accept-CH example above, which is received in response
to a user agent navigating to "https://example.com", and delivered
over a secure transport: a user agent will have to persist an Accept-
CH preference bound to "https://example.com" and use it for user
agent navigations to "https://example.com" and any same-origin
resource requests initiated by the page constructed from the
navigation's response. This preference will not extend to resource
requests initiated to "https://example.com" from other origins.
3.2. Interaction with Caches
When selecting a response based on one or more Client Hints, and if
the resource is cacheable, the server needs to generate a Vary
response header field ([RFC7234]) to indicate which hints can affect
the selected response and whether the selected response is
appropriate for a later request.
Vary: Sec-CH-Example
Above example indicates that the cache key needs to include the Sec-
CH-Example header field.
Vary: Sec-CH-Example, Sec-CH-Example-2
Above example indicates that the cache key needs to include the Sec-
CH-Example and Sec-CH-Example-2 header fields.
4. Security Considerations
4.1. Information Exposure
Request header fields used in features relying on this document
expose information about the user's environment to enable proactive
content negotiation. Such information might reveal new information
about the user and implementers ought to consider the following
considerations, recommendations, and best practices.
The underlying assumption is that exposing information about the user
as a request header is equivalent to the capability of that request's
origin to access that information by other means and transmit it to
itself.
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Therefore, features relying on this document to define Client Hint
headers MUST NOT provide new information that is otherwise not
available to the application via other means, such as existing
request headers, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
Such features SHOULD take into account the following aspects of the
information exposed:
o Entropy - Exposing highly granular data can be used to help
identify users across multiple requests to different origins.
Reducing the set of header field values that can be expressed, or
restricting them to an enumerated range where the advertised value
is close but is not an exact representation of the current value,
can improve privacy and reduce risk of linkability by ensuring
that the same value is sent by multiple users.
o Sensitivity - The feature SHOULD NOT expose user sensitive
information. To that end, information available to the
application, but gated behind specific user actions (e.g. a
permission prompt or user activation) SHOULD NOT be exposed as a
Client Hint.
o Change over time - The feature SHOULD NOT expose user information
that changes over time, unless the state change itself is also
exposed (e.g. through JavaScript callbacks).
Different features will be positioned in different points in the
space between low-entropy, non-sensitive and static information (e.g.
user agent information), and high-entropy, sensitive and dynamic
information (e.g. geolocation). User agents SHOULD consider the
value provided by a particular feature vs these considerations, and
MAY have different policies regarding that tradeoff on a per-feature
basis.
Implementers ought to consider both user and server controlled
mechanisms and policies to control which Client Hints header fields
are advertised:
o Implementers SHOULD restrict delivery of some or all Client Hints
header fields to the opt-in origin only, unless the opt-in origin
has explicitly delegated permission to another origin to request
Client Hints header fields.
o Implementers MAY provide user choice mechanisms so that users can
balance privacy concerns with bandwidth limitations. However,
implementers SHOULD also be aware that explaining the privacy
implications of passive fingerprinting to users can be
challenging.
o Implementations specific to certain use cases or threat models MAY
avoid transmitting some or all of Client Hints header fields. For
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example, avoid transmission of header fields that can carry higher
risks of linkability.
Implementers SHOULD support Client Hints opt-in mechanisms and MUST
clear persisted opt-in preferences when any one of site data,
browsing history, browsing cache, cookies, or similar, are cleared.
4.2. Deployment and Security Risks
Deployment of new request headers requires several considerations:
o Potential conflicts due to existing use of header field name
o Properties of the data communicated in header field value
Authors of new Client Hints are advised to carefully consider whether
they need to be able to be added by client-side content (e.g.,
scripts), or whether they need to be exclusively set by the user
agent. In the latter case, the Sec- prefix on the header field name
has the effect of preventing scripts and other application content
from setting them in user agents. Using the "Sec-" prefix signals to
servers that the user agent - and not application content - generated
the values. See [FETCH] for more information.
By convention, request headers that are client hints are encouraged
to use a CH- prefix, to make them easier to identify as using this
framework; for example, CH-Foo or, with a "Sec-" prefix, Sec-CH-Foo.
Doing so makes them easier to identify programmatically (e.g., for
stripping unrecognised hints from requests by privacy filters).
4.3. Abuse Detection
A user agent that tracks access to active fingerprinting information
SHOULD consider emission of Client Hints headers similarly to the way
it would consider access to the equivalent API.
Research into abuse of Client Hints might look at how HTTP responses
that contain Client Hints differ from those with different values,
and from those without. This might be used to reveal which Client
Hints are in use, allowing researchers to further analyze that use.
5. Cost of Sending Hints
While HTTP header compression schemes reduce the cost of adding HTTP
header fields, sending Client Hints to the server incurs an increase
in request byte size. Servers SHOULD take that into account when
opting in to receive Client Hints, and SHOULD NOT opt-in to receive
hints unless they are to be used for content adaptation purposes.
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Due to request byte size increase, features relying on this document
to define Client Hints MAY consider restricting sending those hints
to certain request destinations [FETCH], where they are more likely
to be useful.
6. IANA Considerations
This document defines the "Accept-CH" HTTP response header field, and
registers it in the Permanent Message Header Fields registry.
6.1. Accept-CH
o Header field name: Accept-CH
o Applicable protocol: HTTP
o Status: standard
o Author/Change controller: IETF
o Specification document(s): Section 3.1 of this document
o Related information: for Client Hints
7. Changes
7.1. Since -00
o Issue 168 (make Save-Data extensible) updated ABNF.
o Issue 163 (CH review feedback) editorial feedback from httpwg
list.
o Issue 153 (NetInfo API citation) added normative reference.
7.2. Since -01
o Issue 200: Moved Key reference to informative.
o Issue 215: Extended passive fingerprinting and mitigation
considerations.
o Changed document status to experimental.
7.3. Since -02
o Issue 239: Updated reference to CR-css-values-3
o Issue 240: Updated reference for Network Information API
o Issue 241: Consistency in IANA considerations
o Issue 250: Clarified Accept-CH
7.4. Since -03
o Issue 284: Extended guidance for Accept-CH
o Issue 308: Editorial cleanup
o Issue 306: Define Accept-CH-Lifetime
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7.5. Since -04
o Issue 361: Removed Downlink
o Issue 361: Moved Key to appendix, plus other editorial feedback
7.6. Since -05
o Issue 372: Scoped CH opt-in and delivery to secure transports
o Issue 373: Bind CH opt-in to origin
7.7. Since -06
o Issue 524: Save-Data is now defined by NetInfo spec, dropping
o PR 775: Removed specific features to be defined in other
specifications
7.8. Since -07
o Issue 761: Clarified that the defined headers are response
headers.
o Issue 730: Replaced Key reference with Variants.
o Issue 700: Replaced ABNF with structured headers.
o PR 878: Removed Accept-CH-Lifetime based on feedback at IETF 105
7.9. Since -08
o PR 985: Describe the bytesize cost of hints.
o PR 776: Add Sec- and CH- prefix considerations.
o PR 1001: Clear CH persistence when cookies are cleared.
7.10. Since -09
o PR 1064: Fix merge issues with "cost of sending hints".
7.11. Since -10
o PR 1072: LC feedback from Julian Reschke.
o PR 1080: Improve list style.
o PR 1082: Remove section mentioning Variants.
o PR 1097: Editorial feedback from mnot.
o PR 1131: Remove unused references.
o PR 1132: Remove nested list.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Mark Nottingham, Julian Reschke, Chris Bentzel, Ben
Greenstein, Tarun Bansal, Roy Fielding, Vasiliy Faronov, Ted Hardie,
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Jonas Sicking, Martin Thomson, and numerous other members of the IETF
HTTP Working Group for invaluable help and feedback.
9. References
9.1. Normative References
[FETCH] van Kesteren, A., "Fetch", n.d.,
.
[I-D.ietf-httpbis-header-structure]
Nottingham, M. and P. Kamp, "Structured Field Values for
HTTP", draft-ietf-httpbis-header-structure-16 (work in
progress), March 2020.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
.
[RFC5234] Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5234, January 2008,
.
[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,
.
[RFC7234] Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke,
Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Caching",
RFC 7234, DOI 10.17487/RFC7234, June 2014,
.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, .
9.2. Informative References
[RFC6265] Barth, A., "HTTP State Management Mechanism", RFC 6265,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6265, April 2011,
.
[UA-CH] West, M. and Y. Weiss, "User Agent Client Hints", n.d.,
.
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9.3. URIs
[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/
[2] http://httpwg.github.io/
[3] https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/labels/client-hints
Authors' Addresses
Ilya Grigorik
Google
Email: ilya@igvita.com
URI: https://www.igvita.com/
Yoav Weiss
Google
Email: yoav@yoav.ws
URI: https://blog.yoav.ws/
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