The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Opportunistic Security for HTTP/2' (draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-encryption-11.txt) as Experimental RFC This document is the product of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Alexey Melnikov, Ben Campbell and Alissa Cooper. A URL of this Internet Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-encryption/ Technical Summary This document presents an experimental way to use RFC 7838 to achieve opportunistic encryption connections to http:// schemed resources. While this does not offer the true security guarantees of the https:// scheme, it does improve resistance to passive surveillance by requiring some minimal level of active attack to defeat. Working Group Summary The document has been closely reviewed and discussed by a small number of vocal participants, with a larger number of other participants adding occasional feedback. The community is generally divided about the utility of providing a tool which is so easily defeated by an active attacker, but there have been very few who believe this experiment would be detrimental. The primary concern voiced by dissenters has been that widespread deployment might provide a false sense of security, slowing the adoption of "real" HTTPS or confusing users. The restriction in section 4.1 was added to help mitigate this concern. RFC 7838 requires "reasonable assurances" that the alternative was under the control of the same authority as the origin. RFC 7838 defines only one means of having such assurance: possession of a TLS certificate for the origin. After much discussion, this draft maintains that definition and requires the use of fully verified certificates. The other item of particular concern around using RFC7838 with http:// URIs was server support for receiving requests for http:// schemed resources on ports configured to use TLS. While HTTP/1.1 might permit and HTTP/2 mandates the inclusion of the URL scheme with the request, it appears that almost no server implementations treat the included scheme as more authoritative than the port on which it was received. This is noted in section 4.4. As a result, the final version of this document prohibits the use of HTTP/1.1 and uses the .well-known resource as a server's self-certification that it can correctly distinguish such requests. A primary learning from experimentation with this draft will be to what degree this server behavior presents a deployment issue in the real world, and the degree to which servers will incorrectly claim this capability. Document Quality There is a client implementation in Mozilla Firefox, though other browsers have expressed limited interest at this time. No explicit implementation of this draft is required in server software (the necessary resources and headers can be administratively configured). Personnel Mike Bishop is the document shepherd; Alexey Melnikov is the responsible Area Director.
