I-Regexp: An Interoperable Regexp Format
draft-bormann-jsonpath-iregexp-01
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Author | Carsten Bormann | ||
Last updated | 2021-11-13 | ||
Replaced by | draft-ietf-jsonpath-iregexp, RFC 9485 | ||
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draft-bormann-jsonpath-iregexp-01
Network Working Group C. Bormann Internet-Draft Universität Bremen TZI Intended status: Standards Track 13 November 2021 Expires: 17 May 2022 I-Regexp: An Interoperable Regexp Format draft-bormann-jsonpath-iregexp-01 Abstract "Regular expressions" (regexps) are a set of related, widely implemented pattern languages used in data modeling formats and query languages that is available in many dialects. This specification defines an interoperable flavor of regexps, I-Regexp. The present version -01 of this document is a slight update of the original trial balloon, meant to determine whether this approach is useful for the JSONPath WG. Discussion Venues This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC. Discussion of this document takes place on the JSONpath Working Group mailing list (JSONpath@ietf.org), which is archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/JSONpath/. Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/cabo/iregexp. 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." This Internet-Draft will expire on 17 May 2022. Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 1] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2021 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 (https://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. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. Subsetting XSD Regexps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. Formal definition of I-Regexp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 5. Mapping I-Regexp to Regexp Dialects . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5.1. XSD Regexps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5.2. ECMAScript Regexps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5.3. PCRE, RE2, Ruby Regexps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 5.4. << Your kind of Regexp here >> . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 7. Security considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Appendix A. Regexps and Similar Constructs in Published RFCs . . 10 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1. Introduction Data modeling formats (YANG, CDDL) as well as query languages (jsonpath) often need a regular expression (regexp) sublanguage. There are many dialects of regular expressions in use in platforms, programming languages, and data modeling formats. While regular expressions originally were intended to provide a Boolean matching function, they have turned into parsing functions for many applications, with capture groups, greedy/lazy/possessive variants, etc. Language features such as backreferences allow specifying languages that actually are context-free (Chomsky type 2) instead of the regular languages (Chomsky type 3) that regular expressions are named for. Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 2] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 YANG (Section 9.4.5 of [RFC7950]) and CDDL (Section 3.8.3 of [RFC8610]) have adopted the regexp language from W3C Schema [XSD2]. XSD regexp is a pure matching language, i.e., XSD regexps can be used to match a string against them and yield a simple true or false result. XSD regexps are not as widely implemented as programming language regexp dialects such as those of Perl, Python, Ruby, Go [RE2], or JavaScript (ECMAScript) [ECMA-262]. The latter are often in a state of continuous development; in the best case (ECMAScript) there is a complete specification which however is highly complex (Section 21.2 of [ECMA-262] comprises 62 pages) and evolves on a yearly timeline, with significant additions. Regexp dialects such as PCRE [PCRE2] have evolved to cover a common set of functions available in parsing regexp dialects, offered in a widely available library. With continuing accretion of complex features, parsing regexp libraries have become susceptible to bugs and performance degradation, in particular those that can be exploited in DoS attacks. The library RE2 that is compatible with Go language regexps strives to be immune to DoS attacks, making it attractive to applications such as query languages where an attacker could control the input. The problem remains that other bugs in such libraries can lead to exploitable vulnerabilities; at the time of writing, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system has 131 entries that mention the word "regex" [REGEX-CVE] (not all, but many of which are such bugs, with 23 matches for arbitrary code execution). Implementations of YANG and CDDL often struggle with providing true XSD regexps; some instead cheat by providing one of the parsing regexp varieties, sometime without even advertising this fact. A matching regexp that does not use the more complex XSD features (Section 3) can usually be converted into a parsing regexp of many dialects by simply surrounding it with anchors of that dialect (e.g., ^ or \A and $ or \z). If the original matching regexps exceed the envelope of compatibility between dialects, this can lead to interoperability problems, or, worse, security vulnerabilities. Also, features of the target dialect such as capture groups may be triggered inadvertently, reducing performance. The present specification defines an interoperable regexp flavor for matching, I-Regexp. This flavor is a subset of XSD regexps. It also comes with defined rules for converting the regexp into common parsing regexp dialects. Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 3] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 2. Requirements I-Regexps should handle the vast majority of practical cases where a matching regexp is needed in a data model specification or a query language expression. A brief survey of published RFCs yielded the regexp patterns in Appendix A (with no attempt at completeness). These should be covered by I-Regexps, both syntactically and with their intended semantics. 3. Subsetting XSD Regexps XSD Regexps are relatively easy to implement or map to widely implemented parsing regexp dialects, with a small number of notable exceptions: * Character class subtraction. This is a very useful feature in many specifications, but it is unfortunately mostly absent from parsing regexp dialects. - *Issue*: This absence can often be addressed by translating character class subtraction into positive character classes (possibly requiring significant expansion) and/or inserting negative lookahead assertions (which are not universally supported by regexp libraries, most notably not by RE2 [RE2]). This specification therefore opts for leaving out character class subtraction, but that decision is up for discussion. * Unicode. While there is no doubt that a regexp flavor meant to last needs to be Unicode enabled, there are a number of aspects of this that need discussion. First of all, predefined character classes such as \w may be meant to be ASCII only, or they may encompass all letters and digits defined in Unicode. The latter is usually of interest in query languages, while the former is of interest to a subset of applications in data model specifications. Second, not all regexp implementations that one might want to map I-Regexps to will support accesses to Unicode tables that enable executing on constructs such as \p{IsCoptic}. - *Issue*: The ASCII focus can partially be addressed by adding a constraint that the matched text has to be ASCII in the first place. This often is all that is needed where regexps are used to define lexical elements of a computer language. The access to Unicode tables can simply be ruled out. (Note that RFC 6643 contains a lone instance of \p{IsBasicLatin}{0,255}, which is needed to describe a transition from a legacy character set to Unicode. The author believes that this would be a rare Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 4] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 application and can be left out. RFC2622 contains [[:digit:]], [[:alpha:]], [[:alnum:]], albeit in a specification for the flex tool; this is intended to be close to \d, \p{L}, \w in an ASCII subset.) 4. Formal definition of I-Regexp The syntax of I-Regexp is defined by the ABNF specification in Figure 1, with the following additional restriction: * \w or \S MUST NOT occur in negative charClassExpr, i.e., in charClassExpr that include the optional "^" at the start. - *Rationale*: an exact implementation of XSD \w or \S in a negative charClassExpr essentially requires character class subtraction, which is not supported in I-Regexp (Section 3). - *Issue*: the ABNF grammar could express this restriction (by splitting charClassExpr, CCE1, charClassEsc, and MultiCharExp into positive and negative branches each), but would be harder to read. This syntax is a subset of that of [XSD2]; the semantics of all the constructs allowed by this ABNF grammar are the same as those in [XSD2]. Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 5] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 i-regexp = branch *( "|" branch ) branch = *piece piece = atom [ quantifier ] quantifier = ( %x2A-2B ; '*'-'+' / "?" ) / ( "{" quantity "}" ) quantity = QuantExact [ "," [ QuantExact ] ] QuantExact = 1*%x30-39 ; '0'-'9' atom = NormalChar / charClass / ( "(" i-regexp ")" ) NormalChar = ( %x00-27 / %x2C-2D ; ','-'-' / %x2F-3E ; '/'-'>' / %x40-5A ; '@'-'Z' / %x5E-7A ; '^'-'z' / %x7E-10FFFF ) charClass = "." / SingleCharEsc / charClassEsc / charClassExpr SingleCharEsc = "\" ( %x28-2B ; '('-'+' / %x2D-2E ; '-'-'.' / "?" / %x5B-5E ; '['-'^' / %s"n" / %s"r" / %s"t" / %x7B-7D ; '{'-'}' ) charClassEsc = MultiCharEsc / catEsc / complEsc MultiCharEsc = "\" ( %s"D" / %s"S" / %s"W" / %s"d" / %s"s" / %s"w" ) charClassExpr = "[" [ "^" ] ( "-" / CCE1 ) *CCE1 [ "-" ] "]" CCE1 = ( CCchar [ "-" CCchar ] ) / charClassEsc CCchar = ( %x00-2C / %x2E-5A ; '.'-'Z' / %x5E-10FFFF ) / SingleCharEsc catEsc = %s"\p{" charProp "}" complEsc = %s"\P{" charProp "}" charProp = IsCategory / IsBlock IsCategory = Letters / Marks / Numbers / Punctuation / Separators / Symbols / Others Letters = %s"L" [ ( %x6C-6D ; 'l'-'m' / %s"o" / %x74-75 ; 't'-'u' ) ] Marks = %s"M" [ ( %s"c" / %s"e" / %s"n" ) ] Numbers = %s"N" [ ( %s"d" / %s"l" / %s"o" ) ] Punctuation = %s"P" [ ( %x63-66 ; 'c'-'f' / %s"i" / %s"o" / %s"s" ) ] Separators = %s"Z" [ ( %s"l" / %s"p" / %s"s" ) ] Symbols = %s"S" [ ( %s"c" / %s"k" / %s"m" / %s"o" ) ] Others = %s"C" [ ( %s"c" / %s"f" / %x6E-6F ; 'n'-'o' ) ] IsBlock = %s"Is" 1*( "-" / %x30-39 ; '0'-'9' / %x41-5A ; 'A'-'Z' / %x61-7A ; 'a'-'z' ) Figure 1 Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 6] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 About a third of the complexity of this ABNF grammar comes from going into details on the Unicode IsCategory classes. Additional complexity stems from the way hyphens can be used inside character classes to denote ranges; the grammar deliberately excludes questionable usage such as /[a-z-A-Z]/. * *Issue*: This is essentially XSD regexp without character class subtraction. There is probably potential for simplification in IsBlock (leave out) and possibly in the rather large part for IsCategory as well. The ABNF has been automatically generated and maybe could use some polishing. The ABNF has been verified against Appendix A, but a wider corpus of regular expressions should be examined. 5. Mapping I-Regexp to Regexp Dialects (TBD; these mappings need to be thoroughly verified.) 5.1. XSD Regexps Any I-Regexp also is an XSD Regexp [XSD2], so the mapping is an identify function. 5.2. ECMAScript Regexps Perform the following steps on an I-Regexp to obtain an ECMAScript regexp [ECMA-262]: * Replace any MultiCharEsc and dots (.) outside character classes as in Table 1. * For any MultiCharEsc that show a charClassEsp (and not a charClassExpr) in the second column of Table 1, replace them inside the charClassExpr of the regexp as per Table 1. * For MultiCharEsc that do show a charClassExpr in the second column of Table 1 ("CCE2"), replace them inside charClassExpr of the regexp ("CCE1") as follows: - Examine for both charChlassExpr whether it is negative (has a "^" at the start). - Strip the brackets and any leading "^" from CCE2, yielding CC2. - If CCE2 is not negative, replace the MultiCharEsc by CC2. Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 7] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 - If CCE2 is negative but CCE1 is not, remove the MultiCharEsc from CCE1 and replace the entire CCE1 by the construct (CCE1 | CCE2). - If both CCE1 and CCE2 are negative, fail (see Section 4). * Envelope the result in ^ and $. Note that where a regexp literal is required, this needs to enclose the actual regexp in /. +==========+=======================+==============+ | I-Regexp | ECMAScript equivalent | charClassExp | +==========+=======================+==============+ | . | [^\n\r] | f | +----------+-----------------------+--------------+ | \d | \p{Nd} | t | +----------+-----------------------+--------------+ | \s | [ \t\n\r] | f | +----------+-----------------------+--------------+ | \w | [^\p{P}\p{Z}\p{C}] | f | +----------+-----------------------+--------------+ | \D | \P{Nd} | t | +----------+-----------------------+--------------+ | \S | [^ \t\n\r] | f | +----------+-----------------------+--------------+ | \W | [\p{P}\p{Z}\p{C}] | f | +----------+-----------------------+--------------+ Table 1: ECMAScript equivalents of MultiCharEsc The performance can be increased by turning parenthesized regexps (production atom) into (?:...) constructions. 5.3. PCRE, RE2, Ruby Regexps Perform the same steps as in Section 5.2 to obtain a valid regexp in PCRE [PCRE2], the Go programming language [RE2], and the Ruby programming language, except that the last step is: * Envelope the result in \A and \z. Again, the performance can be increased by turning parenthesized regexps (production atom) into (?:...) constructions. Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 8] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 5.4. << Your kind of Regexp here >> (Please submit the mapping needed for your favorite kind of regexp.) 6. IANA Considerations This document makes no requests of IANA. 7. Security considerations TBD (Discuss security issues of regexp implementations, both DoS and RCE; this is covered in part in Section 1.) 8. References 8.1. Normative References [XSD2] Biron, P. and A. Malhotra, "XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation REC-xmlschema-2-20041028, 28 October 2004, <https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xmlschema-2-20041028>. 8.2. Informative References [ECMA-262] Ecma International, "ECMAScript 2020 Language Specification", ECMA Standard ECMA-262, 11th Edition, June 2020, <https://www.ecma-international.org/wp- content/uploads/ECMA-262.pdf>. [PCRE2] "Perl-compatible Regular Expressions (revised API: PCRE2)", n.d., <http://pcre.org/current/doc/html/>. [RE2] "RE2 is a fast, safe, thread-friendly alternative to backtracking regular expression engines like those used in PCRE, Perl, and Python. It is a C++ library.", n.d., <https://github.com/google/re2>. [REGEX-CVE] "CVE - Search Results", n.d., <https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=regex>. [RFC7493] Bray, T., Ed., "The I-JSON Message Format", RFC 7493, DOI 10.17487/RFC7493, March 2015, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7493>. Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 9] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 [RFC7950] Bjorklund, M., Ed., "The YANG 1.1 Data Modeling Language", RFC 7950, DOI 10.17487/RFC7950, August 2016, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7950>. [RFC8610] Birkholz, H., Vigano, C., and C. Bormann, "Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL): A Notational Convention to Express Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and JSON Data Structures", RFC 8610, DOI 10.17487/RFC8610, June 2019, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8610>. Appendix A. Regexps and Similar Constructs in Published RFCs This appendix contains a number of regular expressions that have been extracted from published RFCs based on some ad-hoc matching. Multi- line constructions were not included. All regular expressions validate against the ABNF in Figure 1. rfc6021.txt 459 (([0-1](\.[1-3]?[0-9]))|(2\.(0|([1-9]\d*)))) rfc6021.txt 513 \d*(\.\d*){1,127} rfc6021.txt 529 \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}T\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}(\.\d+)? rfc6021.txt 631 ([0-9a-fA-F]{2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{2})*)? rfc6021.txt 647 [0-9a-fA-F]{2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{2}){5} rfc6021.txt 933 ((:|[0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}):)([0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}:){0,5} rfc6021.txt 938 (([^:]+:){6}(([^:]+:[^:]+)|(.*\..*)))| rfc6021.txt 1026 ((:|[0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}):)([0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}:){0,5} rfc6021.txt 1031 (([^:]+:){6}(([^:]+:[^:]+)|(.*\..*)))| rfc6020.txt 6647 [0-9a-fA-F]* rfc6095.txt 2544 \S(.*\S)? rfc6110.txt 1583 [aeiouy]* rfc6110.txt 3222 [A-Z][a-z]* rfc6536.txt 1583 \* rfc6536.txt 1632 [^\*].* rfc6643.txt 524 \p{IsBasicLatin}{0,255} rfc6728.txt 3480 \S+ rfc6728.txt 3500 \S(.*\S)? rfc6991.txt 477 (([0-1](\.[1-3]?[0-9]))|(2\.(0|([1-9]\d*)))) rfc6991.txt 525 \d*(\.\d*){1,127} rfc6991.txt 541 [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9\-_.]* rfc6991.txt 542 .|..|[^xX].*|.[^mM].*|..[^lL].* rfc6991.txt 571 \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}T\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}(\.\d+)? rfc6991.txt 665 ([0-9a-fA-F]{2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{2})*)? rfc6991.txt 693 [0-9a-fA-F]{2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{2}){5} rfc6991.txt 725 ([0-9a-fA-F]{2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{2})*)? rfc6991.txt 743 [0-9a-fA-F]{8}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}- rfc6991.txt 1041 ((:|[0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}):)([0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}:){0,5} rfc6991.txt 1046 (([^:]+:){6}(([^:]+:[^:]+)|(.*\..*)))| rfc6991.txt 1099 [0-9\.]* rfc6991.txt 1109 [0-9a-fA-F:\.]* Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 10] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 rfc6991.txt 1164 ((:|[0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}):)([0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}:){0,5} rfc6991.txt 1169 (([^:]+:){6}(([^:]+:[^:]+)|(.*\..*)))| rfc7407.txt 933 ([0-9a-fA-F]){2}(:([0-9a-fA-F]){2}){0,254} rfc7407.txt 1494 ([0-9a-fA-F]){2}(:([0-9a-fA-F]){2}){4,31} rfc7758.txt 703 \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}(\.\d+)? rfc7758.txt 1358 \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}(\.\d+)? rfc7895.txt 349 \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} rfc7950.txt 8323 [0-9a-fA-F]* rfc7950.txt 8355 [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9\-_.]* rfc7950.txt 8356 [xX][mM][lL].* rfc8040.txt 4713 \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} rfc8049.txt 6704 [A-Z]{2} rfc8194.txt 629 \* rfc8194.txt 637 [0-9]{8}\.[0-9]{6} rfc8194.txt 905 Z|[\+\-]\d{2}:\d{2} rfc8194.txt 963 (2((2[4-9])|(3[0-9]))\.).* rfc8194.txt 974 (([fF]{2}[0-9a-fA-F]{2}):).* rfc8299.txt 7986 [A-Z]{2} rfc8341.txt 1878 \* rfc8341.txt 1927 [^\*].* rfc8407.txt 1723 [0-9\.]* rfc8407.txt 1749 [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9\-_.]* rfc8407.txt 1750 .|..|[^xX].*|.[^mM].*|..[^lL].* rfc8525.txt 550 \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} rfc8776.txt 838 /?([a-zA-Z0-9\-_.]+)(/[a-zA-Z0-9\-_.]+)* rfc8776.txt 874 ([a-zA-Z0-9\-_.]+:)* rfc8819.txt 311 [\S ]+ rfc8944.txt 596 [0-9a-fA-F]{2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{2}){7} Figure 2: Example regular expressions extracted from RFCs Acknowledgements This draft has been motivated by the discussion in the IETF JSONPATH WG about whether to include a regexp mechanism into the JSONPath query expression specification, as well as by previous discussions about the YANG pattern and CDDL .regexp features. The basic approach for this draft was inspired by The I-JSON Message Format [RFC7493]. Author's Address Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 11] Internet-Draft I-Regexp November 2021 Carsten Bormann Universität Bremen TZI Postfach 330440 D-28359 Bremen Germany Phone: +49-421-218-63921 Email: cabo@tzi.org Bormann Expires 17 May 2022 [Page 12]