WebFinger
draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-11

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Network Working Group                                      Paul E. Jones
Internet Draft                                         Gonzalo Salgueiro
Intended status: Standards Track                           Cisco Systems
Expires: September 8, 2013                                  Joseph Smarr
                                                                  Google
                                                           March 8, 2013

                                 WebFinger
                    draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-11.txt

Abstract

   This specification defines the WebFinger protocol, which can be used
   to discover information about people or other entities on the
   Internet using standard HTTP methods.  WebFinger discovers
   information for a URI that might not be usable as a locator
   otherwise, such as account or email URIs.

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 http://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 September 8, 2013.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2013 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
   (http://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

Jones, et al.         Expires September 8, 2013                 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft                WebFinger                       March 2013

   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction...................................................2
   2. Terminology....................................................3
   3. Example Uses of WebFinger......................................3
      3.1. Locating a User's Blog....................................3
      3.2. Identity Provider Discovery for OpenID Connect............5
      3.3. Auto-Configuration of Email Clients.......................6
      3.4. Retrieving Device Information.............................7
   4. WebFinger Protocol.............................................8
      4.1. Constructing a WebFinger Request URI......................8
      4.2. Performing a WebFinger Query..............................9
      4.3. The "rel" Parameter.......................................9
      4.4. The JSON Resource Descriptor (JRD).......................11
         4.4.1. subject.............................................11
         4.4.2. aliases.............................................12
         4.4.3. properties..........................................12
         4.4.4. links...............................................12
      4.5. WebFinger and URIs.......................................14
   5. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)..........................15
   6. Access Control................................................15
   7. Hosted WebFinger Services.....................................16
   8. Security Considerations.......................................17
   9. IANA Considerations...........................................18
      9.1. Well-Known URI...........................................18
      9.2. JSON Resource Descriptor (JRD) Media Type................18
   10. Acknowledgments..............................................20
   11. References...................................................20
      11.1. Normative References....................................20
      11.2. Informative References..................................21
   Author's Addresses...............................................22

1. Introduction

   WebFinger is used to discover information about people or other
   entities on the Internet that are identified by a URI [6] or IRI [7]
   using standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [2] methods over a
   secure transport [14].  A WebFinger resource returns a JavaScript
   Object Notation (JSON) [5] object describing the entity that is
   queried.  The JSON object is referred to as the JSON Resource
   Descriptor (JRD).

   For a person, the kinds of information that might be discoverable via