| Network Working Group | M. Nottingham |
| Internet-Draft | Rackspace |
| Updates: 2616 (if approved) | R. Fielding |
| Intended status: Standards Track | Adobe |
| Expires: May 03, 2012 | October 31, 2011 |
Additional HTTP Status Codes
draft-nottingham-http-new-status-03
This document specifies additional HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status codes for a variety of common situations.
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Discussions of the HTTPbis Working Group are archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/.
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This document specifies additional HTTP [RFC2616] status codes for a variety of common situations, to improve interoperability and avoid confusion when other, less precise status codes are used.
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 status code indicates that the origin server requires the request to be conditional.
Its typical use is to avoid the "lost update" problem, where a client GETs a resource's state, modifies it, and PUTs it back to the server, when meanwhile a third party has modified the state on the server, leading to a conflict. By requiring requests to be conditional, the server can assure that clients are working with the correct copies.
Responses using this status code SHOULD explain how to resubmit the request successfully. For example:
HTTP/1.1 428 Precondition Required
Content-Type: text/html
<html>
<head>
<title>Precondition Required</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Precondition Required</h1>
<p>This request is required to be conditional;
try using "If-Match".</p>
</body>
</html>
Responses with the 428 status code MUST NOT be stored by a cache.
This status code indicates that the user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time ("rate limiting").
The response representations SHOULD include details explaining the condition, and MAY include a Retry-After header indicating how long to wait before making a new request.
For example:
HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Content-Type: text/html
Retry-After: 3600
<html>
<head>
<title>Too Many Requests</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Too many Requests</h1>
<p>I only allow 50 requests per hour to this Web site per
logged in user. Try again soon.</p>
</body>
</html>
Note that this specification does not define how the origin server identifies the user, nor how it counts requests. For example, an origin server that is limiting request rates can do so based upon counts of requests on a per-resource basis, across the entire server, or even among a set of servers. Likewise, it might identify the user by its authentication credentials, or a stateful cookie.
Responses with the 429 status code MUST NOT be stored by a cache.
This status code indicates that the server is unwilling to process the request because its header fields are too large. The request MAY be resubmitted after reducing the size of the request header fields.
It can be used both when the set of request header fields in total are too large, and when a single header field is at fault. In the latter case, the response representation SHOULD specify which header field was too large.
For example:
HTTP/1.1 431 Request Header Fields Too Large
Content-Type: text/html
<html>
<head>
<title>Request Header Fields Too Large</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Request Header Fields Too Large</h1>
<p>The "Example" header was too large.</p>
</body>
</html>
Responses with the 431 status code MUST NOT be stored by a cache.
This status code indicates that the client needs to authenticate to gain network access.
The response representation SHOULD indicate how to do this; e.g., with an HTML form for submitting credentials.
The 511 status SHOULD NOT be generated by origin servers; it is intended for use by intercepting proxies that are interposed as a means of controlling access to the network.
Responses with the 511 status code MUST NOT be stored by a cache.
A network operator wishing to require some authentication, acceptance of terms or other user interaction before granting access usually does so by identify clients who have not done so ("unknown clients") using their MAC addresses.
Unknown clients then have all traffic blocked, except for that on TCP port 80, which is sent to a HTTP server (the "login server") dedicated to "logging in" unknown clients, and of course traffic to the login server itself.
For example, a user agent might connect to a network and make the following HTTP request on TCP port 80:
GET /index.htm HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com
Upon receiving such a request, the login server would generate a 511 response:
HTTP/1.1 511 Network Authentication Required
Content-Type: text/html
<html>
<head>
<title>Network Authentication Required</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0; url=https://login.example.net/">
</head>
<body>
<p>You need to <a href="https://login.example.net/">
authenticate with the local network</a> in order to gain
access.</p>
</body>
</html>
Here, the 511 status code assures that non-browser clients will not interpret the response as being from the origin server, and the META HTML element redirects the user agent to the login server.
Note that the 511 response can itself contain the login interface, but it may not be desirable to do so, because browsers would show the login interface as being associated with the originally requested URL, which may cause confusion.
The 428 status code is optional; clients cannot rely upon its use to prevent "lost update" conflicts.
Servers are not required to use the 429 status code; when limiting resource usage, it may be more appropriate to just drop connections, or take other steps.
Servers are not required to use the 431 status code; when under attack, it may be more appropriate to just drop connections, or take other steps.
In common use, a response carrying the 511 status code will not come from the origin server indicated in the request's URL. This presents many security issues; e.g., an attacking intermediary may be inserting cookies into the original domain's name space, may be observing cookies or HTTP authentication credentials sent from the user agent, and so on.
However, these risks are not unique to the 511 status code; in other words, a captive portal that is not using this status code introduces the same issues.
The HTTP Status Codes Registry should be updated with the following entries:
| [RFC2119] | Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. |
| [RFC2616] | Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P. and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999. |
| [RFC4918] | Dusseault, L., "HTTP Extensions for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)", RFC 4918, June 2007. |
| [RFC4791] | Daboo, C., Desruisseaux, B. and L.M. Dusseault, "Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV)", RFC 4791, March 2007. |
Thanks to Jan Algermissen and Julian Reschke for their suggestions and feedback.
The authors take all responsibility for errors and omissions.
Since clients cannot differentiate between a portal's response and that of the HTTP server that they intended to communicate with, a number of issues arise.
One example is the "favicon.ico" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon commonly used by browsers to identify the site being accessed. If the favicon for a given site is fetched from a captive portal instead of the intended site (e.g., because the user is unauthenticated), it will often "stick" in the browser's cache (most implementations cache favicons aggressively) beyond the portal session, so that it seems as if the portal's favicon has "taken over" the legitimate site.
Another browser-based issue comes about when P3P http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/ is supported. Depending on how it is implemented, it's possible a browser might interpret a portal's response for the p3p.xml file as the server's, resulting in the privacy policy (or lack thereof) advertised by the portal being interpreted as applying to the intended site. Other Web-based protocols such as WebFinger http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/wiki/WebFingerProtocol, CORS http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/ and OAuth http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2 may also be vulnerable to such issues.
Although HTTP is most widely used with Web browsers, a growing number of non-browsing applications use it as a substrate protocol. For example, WebDAV [RFC4918] and CalDAV [RFC4791] both use HTTP as the basis (for remote authoring and calendaring, respectively). Using these applications from behind a captive portal can result in spurious errors being presented to the user, and might result in content corruption, in extreme cases.
Similarly, other non-browser applications using HTTP can be affected as well; e.g., widgets http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/, software updates, and other specialised software such as Twitter clients and the iTunes Music Store.
It should be noted that it's sometimes believed that using HTTP redirection to direct traffic to the portal addresses these issues. However, since many of these uses "follow" redirects, this is not a good solution.