Internet-Draft | DNS Aliases Proxy-Status | January 2023 |
Pauly | Expires 22 July 2023 | [Page] |
- Workgroup:
- HTTP
- Internet-Draft:
- draft-ietf-httpbis-alias-proxy-status-01
- Published:
- Intended Status:
- Standards Track
- Expires:
HTTP Proxy-Status Parameter for Next-Hop Aliases
Abstract
This document defines an HTTP Proxy-Status Parameter that contains a list of aliases and canonical names received over DNS when establishing a connection to the next hop.¶
About This Document
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-alias-proxy-status/.¶
Discussion of this document takes place on the HTTP Working Group mailing list (mailto:ietf-http-wg@w3.org), which is archived at https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/. Working Group information can be found at https://httpwg.org/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/labels/alias-proxy-status.¶
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 22 July 2023.¶
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2023 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.¶
1. Introduction
The Proxy-Status HTTP response field [PROXY-STATUS] allows proxies to convey information about how a proxied request was handled in HTTP responses sent to clients. It defines a set of parameters that provide information, such as the name of the next hop.¶
[PROXY-STATUS] defines a next-hop
parameter, which can contain a hostname,
IP address, or alias of the next hop. This parameter can contain only one such item,
so it cannot be used to communicate a chain of aliases encountered during DNS resolution
when connecting to the next hop.¶
Knowing the full chain of names that were used during DNS resolution via CNAME records [DNS] is particularly useful for clients of forward proxies, in which the client is requesting to connect to a specific target hostname using the CONNECT method [HTTP] or UDP proxying [CONNECT-UDP]. CNAME records can be used to "cloak" hosts that perform tracking or malicious activity behind more innocuous hostnames, and clients such as web browsers use the chain of DNS names to influence behavior like cookie usage policies [COOKIES] or blocking of malicious hosts.¶
This document allows clients to receive the CNAME chain of DNS names for the next hop
by including the list of names in a new next-hop-aliases
Proxy-Status parameter.¶
1.1. Requirements
The key words "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.¶
2. next-hop-aliases Parameter
The next-hop-aliases
parameter's value is a String that contains one or more DNS names in
a comma-separated list. The items in the list include all alias names and canonical names
received in CNAME records [DNS] during the course of resolving the next hop's
hostname using DNS, not including the original requested hostname itself. The names SHOULD
appear in the order in which they were received in DNS. If there are multiple CNAME records
in the chain, the first name in the next-hop-aliases
list would be the value in the CNAME
record for the original hostname, and the final name in the next-hop-aliases
list would
be the name that ultimately resolved to one or more addresses.¶
The list of DNS names in next-hop-aliases
use a comma (",") as a separator between names.
DNS names normally just contain alphanumeric characters and hyphens ("-"), although they
are allowed to contain any character [RFC1035], Section 3.1, including a comma. To
prevent commas or other special characters in names leading to incorrect parsing,
any characters that appear in names in this list that do not belong to the set of URI
Unreserved Characters [RFC3986], Section 2.3 MUST be percent-encoded as
defined in [RFC3986], Section 2.1.¶
For example, consider a proxy "proxy.example.net" that receives the following records when performing DNS resolution for the next hop "host.example.com":¶
host.example.com. CNAME tracker.example.com. tracker.example.com. CNAME service1.example-cdn.com. service1.example-cdn.com. AAAA 2001:db8::1¶
The proxy could include the following proxy status in its response:¶
Proxy-Status: proxy.example.net; next-hop=2001:db8::1; next-hop-aliases="tracker.example.com,service1.example-cdn.com"¶
This indicates that proxy.example.net, which used the IP address "2001:db8::1" as the next hop
for this request, encountered the names "tracker.example.com" and "service1.example-cdn.com"
in the DNS resolution chain. Note that while this example includes both the next-hop
and
next-hop-aliases
parameters, next-hop-aliases
can be included without including next-hop
.¶
The next-hop-aliases
parameter only applies when DNS was used to resolve the next hop's name, and
does not apply in all situations. Clients can use the information in this parameter to determine
how to use the connection established through the proxy, but need to gracefully handle situations
in which this parameter is not present.¶
3. Security Considerations
The next-hop-aliases
parameter does not include any DNSSEC information or imply that DNSSEC was used.
The information included in the parameter can only be trusted to be valid insofar as the client
trusts its proxy to provide accurate information. This information is intended to be used as
a hint, and SHOULD NOT be used for making security decisions about the identity of a resource accessed
through the proxy.¶
4. IANA Considerations
This document registers the "next-hop-aliases" parameter in the "HTTP Proxy-Status Parameters" registry <https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-proxy-status>.¶
5. References
5.1. Normative References
- [CONNECT-UDP]
- Schinazi, D., "Proxying UDP in HTTP", RFC 9298, DOI 10.17487/RFC9298, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9298>.
- [DNS]
- Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - concepts and facilities", STD 13, RFC 1034, DOI 10.17487/RFC1034, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1034>.
- [HTTP]
- Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "HTTP Semantics", STD 97, RFC 9110, DOI 10.17487/RFC9110, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110>.
- [PROXY-STATUS]
- Nottingham, M. and P. Sikora, "The Proxy-Status HTTP Response Header Field", RFC 9209, DOI 10.17487/RFC9209, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9209>.
- [RFC2119]
- Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, , <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, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986>.
- [RFC8174]
- Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.
5.2. Informative References
- [COOKIES]
- Barth, A., "HTTP State Management Mechanism", RFC 6265, DOI 10.17487/RFC6265, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6265>.
- [RFC1035]
- Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - implementation and specification", STD 13, RFC 1035, DOI 10.17487/RFC1035, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1035>.