The WebTransport Protocol Framework
draft-ietf-webtrans-overview-03
The information below is for an old version of the document.
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| Author | Victor Vasiliev | ||
| Last updated | 2022-03-07 | ||
| Replaces | draft-vvv-webtransport-overview | ||
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draft-ietf-webtrans-overview-03
WEBTRANS V. Vasiliev
Internet-Draft Google
Intended status: Standards Track 7 March 2022
Expires: 8 September 2022
The WebTransport Protocol Framework
draft-ietf-webtrans-overview-03
Abstract
The WebTransport Protocol Framework enables clients constrained by
the Web security model to communicate with a remote server using a
secure multiplexed transport. It consists of a set of individual
protocols that are safe to expose to untrusted applications, combined
with a model that allows them to be used interchangeably.
This document defines the overall requirements on the protocols used
in WebTransport, as well as the common features of the protocols,
support for some of which may be optional.
Note to Readers
Discussion of this draft takes place on the WebTransport mailing list
(webtransport@ietf.org), which is archived at
<https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=webtransport>.
The repository tracking the issues for this draft can be found at
<https://github.com/ietf-wg-webtrans/draft-ietf-webtrans-overview/
issues>. The web API draft corresponding to this document can be
found at <https://wicg.github.io/web-transport/>.
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 8 September 2022.
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 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 Revised BSD License text as
described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Common Transport Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Session Establishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Transport Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Datagrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2. Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Transport Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1. Introduction
The WebTransport Protocol Framework enables clients constrained by
the Web security model to communicate with a remote server using a
secure multiplexed transport. It consists of a set of individual
protocols that are safe to expose to untrusted applications, combined
with a model that allows them to be used interchangeably.
This document defines the overall requirements on the protocols used
in WebTransport, as well as the common features of the protocols,
support for some of which may be optional.
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1.1. Background
Historically, web applications that needed a bidirectional data
stream between a client and a server could rely on WebSockets
[RFC6455], a message-based protocol compatible with the Web security
model. However, since the abstraction it provides is a single
ordered stream of messages, it suffers from head-of-line blocking
(HOLB), meaning that all messages must be sent and received in order
even if they are independent and some of them are no longer needed.
This makes it a poor fit for latency-sensitive applications which
rely on partial reliability and stream independence for performance.
One existing option available to Web developers are WebRTC data
channels [RFC8831], which provide a WebSocket-like API for a peer-to-
peer SCTP channel protected by DTLS. In theory, it is possible to
use it for the use cases addressed by this specification. However,
in practice, its use in non-browser-to-browser settings has been
quite low due to its dependency on ICE (which fits poorly with the
Web model) and userspace SCTP (which has very few implementations
available).
An alternative design would be to open multiple WebSocket connections
over HTTP/3 [I-D.ietf-httpbis-h3-websockets] in a manner similar to
how they are currently layered over HTTP/2 [RFC8441]. That would
avoid head-of-line blocking and provide an ability to cancel a stream
by closing the corresponding WebSocket object. However, this
approach has a number of drawbacks, which all stem primarily from the
fact that semantically each WebSocket is a completely independent
entity:
* Each new stream would require a WebSocket handshake to agree on
application protocol used, meaning that it would take at least one
RTT to establish each new stream before the client can write to
it.
* Only clients can initiate streams. Server-initiated streams and
other alternative modes of communication (such as the QUIC
DATAGRAM frame [I-D.ietf-quic-datagram]) are not available.
* While the streams would normally be pooled by the user agent, this
is not guaranteed, and the general process of mapping a WebSocket
to a server is opaque to the client. This introduces
unpredictable performance properties into the system, and prevents
optimizations which rely on the streams being on the same
connection (for instance, it might be possible for the client to
request different retransmission priorities for different streams,
but that would be much more complex unless they are all on the
same connection).
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The WebTransport protocol framework avoids all of those issues by
letting applications create a single transport object that can
contain multiple streams multiplexed together in a single context
(similar to SCTP, HTTP/2, QUIC and others), and can be also used to
send unreliable datagrams (similar to UDP).
1.2. Conventions and Definitions
The keywords "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.
WebTransport is a framework that aims to abstract away the underlying
transport protocol while still exposing a few key transport-layer
aspects to application developers. It is structured around the
following concepts:
WebTransport session: A WebTransport session is a single
communication context established between a client and a server.
It may correspond to a specific transport-layer connection, or it
may be a logical entity within an existing multiplexed transport-
layer connection. Transport sessions are logically independent
from one another even if some sessions can share an underlying
transport-layer connection.
WebTransport protocol: A WebTransport protocol is a specific
protocol that can be used to establish a WebTransport session.
Datagram: A datagram is a unit of transmission that is treated
atomically.
Stream: A stream is a sequence of bytes that is reliably delivered
to the receiving application in the same order as it was
transmitted by the sender. Streams can be of arbitrary length,
and therefore cannot always be buffered entirely in memory.
WebTransport protocols and APIs are expected to provide partial
stream data to the application before the stream has been entirely
received.
Message: A message is a stream that is sufficiently small that it
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can be fully buffered before being passed to the application.
WebTransport does not define messages as a primitive, since from
the transport perspective they can be simulated by fully buffering
a stream before passing it to the application. However, this
distinction is important to highlight since some of the similar
protocols and APIs (notably WebSocket [RFC6455]) use messages as a
core abstraction.
Server: A WebTransport server is an application that accepts
incoming WebTransport sessions.
Client: A WebTransport client is an application that initiates the
transport session and may be running in a constrained security
context, for instance, a JavaScript application running inside a
browser.
User agent: A WebTransport user agent is a software system that has
an unrestricted access to the host network stack and can create
transports on behalf of the client.
2. Common Transport Requirements
Since clients are not necessarily trusted and have to be constrained
by the Web security model, WebTransport imposes certain requirements
on any specific protocol used.
All WebTransport protocols MUST use TLS [RFC8446] or a semantically
equivalent security protocol (for instance, DTLS
[I-D.ietf-tls-dtls13]). The protocols SHOULD use TLS version 1.3 or
later, unless they aim for backwards compatibility with legacy
systems.
All WebTransport protocols MUST require the user agent to obtain and
maintain explicit consent from the server to send data. For
connection-oriented protocols (such as TCP or QUIC), the connection
establishment and keep-alive mechanisms suffice. STUN Consent
Freshness [RFC7675] is another example of a mechanism satisfying this
requirement.
All WebTransport protocols MUST limit the rate at which the client
sends data. This SHOULD be accomplished via a feedback-based
congestion control mechanism (such as [RFC5681] or [RFC9002]).
All WebTransport protocols MUST support simultaneously establishing
multiple sessions between the same client and server.
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All WebTransport protocols MUST prevent clients from establishing
transport sessions to network endpoints that are not WebTransport
servers.
All WebTransport protocols MUST provide a way for the user agent to
indicate the origin [RFC6454] of the client to the server.
All WebTransport protocols MUST provide a way for a server endpoint
location to be described using a URI [RFC3986]. This enables
integration with various Web platform features that represent
resources as URIs, such as Content Security Policy [CSP].
3. Session Establishment
WebTransport session establishment is an asynchronous process. A
session is considered _ready_ from the client's perspective when the
server has confirmed that it is willing to accept the session with
the provided origin and URI. WebTransport protocols MAY allow
clients to send data before the session is ready; however, they MUST
NOT use mechanisms that are unsafe against replay attacks without an
explicit indication from the client.
4. Transport Features
All transport protocols MUST provide datagrams, unidirectional and
bidirectional streams in order to make the transport protocols
interchangeable.
4.1. Datagrams
A datagram is a sequence of bytes that is limited in size (generally
to the path MTU) and is not expected to be transmitted reliably. The
general goal for WebTransport datagrams is to be similar in behavior
to UDP while being subject to common requirements expressed in
Section 2.
A WebTransport sender is not expected to retransmit datagrams, though
it may end up doing so if it is using a TCP-based protocol or some
other underlying protocol that only provides reliable delivery.
WebTransport datagrams are not expected to be flow controlled,
meaning that the receiver might drop datagrams if the application is
not consuming them fast enough.
The application MUST be provided with the maximum datagram size that
it can send. The size SHOULD be derived from the result of
performing path MTU discovery.
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4.2. Streams
A unidirectional stream is a one-way reliable in-order stream of
bytes where the initiator is the only endpoint that can send data. A
bidirectional stream allows both endpoints to send data and can be
conceptually represented as a pair of unidirectional streams.
The streams are in general expected to follow the semantics and the
state machine of QUIC streams ([RFC9000], Sections 2 and 3). TODO:
describe the stream state machine explicitly.
A WebTransport stream can be reset, indicating that the endpoint is
not interested in either sending or receiving any data related to the
stream. In that case, the sender is expected to not retransmit any
data that was already sent on that stream.
Streams SHOULD be sufficiently lightweight that they can be used as
messages.
Data sent on a stream is flow controlled by the transport protocol.
In addition to flow controlling stream data, the creation of new
streams is flow controlled as well: an endpoint may only open a
limited number of streams until the peer explicitly allows creating
more streams.
5. Transport Properties
WebTransport defines common semantics for multiple protocols to allow
them to be used interchangeably. Nevertheless, those protocols still
have substantially different performance properties that an
application may want to query.
The most notable property is support for unreliable data delivery.
The protocol is defined to support unreliable delivery if:
* Resetting a stream results in the lost stream data no longer being
retransmitted, and
* The datagrams are never retransmitted.
Another important property is pooling support. Pooling means that
multiple transport sessions may end up sharing the same transport
layer connection, and thus share a congestion controller and other
contexts.
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6. Security Considerations
Providing untrusted clients with a reasonably low-level access to the
network comes with risks. This document mitigates those risks by
imposing a set of common requirements described in Section 2.
WebTransport mandates the use of TLS for all protocols implementing
it. This has a dual purpose. On one hand, it protects the transport
from the network, including both potential attackers and ossification
by middleboxes. On the other hand, it protects the network elements
from potential confusion attacks such as the one discussed in
Section 10.3 of [RFC6455].
One potential concern is that even when a transport cannot be
created, the connection error would reveal enough information to
allow an attacker to scan the network addresses that would normally
be inaccessible. Because of that, the user agent that runs untrusted
clients MUST NOT provide any detailed error information until the
server has confirmed that it is a WebTransport endpoint. For
example, the client must not be able to distinguish between a network
address that is unreachable and one that is reachable but is not a
WebTransport server.
WebTransport does not support any traditional means of HTTP-based
authentication. It is not necessarily based on HTTP, and hence does
not support HTTP cookies or HTTP authentication. Since it requires
TLS, individual transport protocols MAY expose TLS-based
authentication capabilities such as client certificates.
7. IANA Considerations
There are no requests to IANA in this document.
8. References
8.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.
[RFC3986] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66,
RFC 3986, DOI 10.17487/RFC3986, January 2005,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986>.
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[RFC6454] Barth, A., "The Web Origin Concept", RFC 6454,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6454, December 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6454>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.
[RFC8446] Rescorla, E., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
Version 1.3", RFC 8446, DOI 10.17487/RFC8446, August 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8446>.
8.2. Informative References
[CSP] W3C, "Content Security Policy Level 3", March 2022,
<https://www.w3.org/TR/CSP/>.
[I-D.ietf-httpbis-h3-websockets]
Hamilton, R., "Bootstrapping WebSockets with HTTP/3", Work
in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-httpbis-h3-
websockets-04, 8 February 2022,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-
h3-websockets-04>.
[I-D.ietf-quic-datagram]
Pauly, T., Kinnear, E., and D. Schinazi, "An Unreliable
Datagram Extension to QUIC", Work in Progress, Internet-
Draft, draft-ietf-quic-datagram-10, 4 February 2022,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-
datagram-10>.
[I-D.ietf-tls-dtls13]
Rescorla, E., Tschofenig, H., and N. Modadugu, "The
Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Protocol Version
1.3", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-tls-
dtls13-43, 30 April 2021,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-tls-
dtls13-43>.
[RFC5681] Allman, M., Paxson, V., and E. Blanton, "TCP Congestion
Control", RFC 5681, DOI 10.17487/RFC5681, September 2009,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5681>.
[RFC6455] Fette, I. and A. Melnikov, "The WebSocket Protocol",
RFC 6455, DOI 10.17487/RFC6455, December 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6455>.
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[RFC7675] Perumal, M., Wing, D., Ravindranath, R., Reddy, T., and M.
Thomson, "Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) Usage
for Consent Freshness", RFC 7675, DOI 10.17487/RFC7675,
October 2015, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7675>.
[RFC8441] McManus, P., "Bootstrapping WebSockets with HTTP/2",
RFC 8441, DOI 10.17487/RFC8441, September 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8441>.
[RFC8831] Jesup, R., Loreto, S., and M. Tüxen, "WebRTC Data
Channels", RFC 8831, DOI 10.17487/RFC8831, January 2021,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8831>.
[RFC9000] Iyengar, J., Ed. and M. Thomson, Ed., "QUIC: A UDP-Based
Multiplexed and Secure Transport", RFC 9000,
DOI 10.17487/RFC9000, May 2021,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9000>.
[RFC9002] Iyengar, J., Ed. and I. Swett, Ed., "QUIC Loss Detection
and Congestion Control", RFC 9002, DOI 10.17487/RFC9002,
May 2021, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9002>.
Author's Address
Victor Vasiliev
Google
Email: vasilvv@google.com
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