SIPPING                                                         S. Olson
Internet-Draft                                                 Microsoft
Expires: March 24, 2003                               September 23, 2002


  Requirements for Content Indirection in Session Initiation Protocol
                             (SIP) Messages
                 draft-ietf-sipping-content-indirect-02

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on March 24, 2003.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This specification defines requirements for a mechanism to indirectly
   specify the content of a SIP message for the purpose of transferring
   the content via a non-SIP channel.











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1. Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED",  "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [1].














































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2. Introduction

   The purpose of the Session Initiation Protocol [2] (SIP) is to
   create, modify, or terminate sessions with one or more participants.
   SIP messages, like HTTP, are sytnactically composed of a start line,
   one or more headers, and an optional body.  Unlike HTTP, SIP is not
   designed as a general purpose transport of data.

   There are numerous reasons why it might be desirable to indirectly
   specify the content of a SIP message body.  For bandwidth limited
   applications such as cellular wireless, indirection provides a means
   to annotate the (indirect) content with meta-data which may be used
   by the recipient to determine whether or not to retrieve the content
   over the resource limited link.

   It is also possible that the content size to be transferred might
   potentially overwhelm intermediate signaling proxies, thereby
   unnecessarily increasing network latency.  For time-sensitive SIP
   applications, this may be unacceptable.  Indirect content can remedy
   this by moving the transfer of this content out of the SIP signaling
   network and into a potentially separate data transfer channel.

   There may also be scenarios where the session related data (body)
   that needs to be conveyed does not directly reside on the endpoint or
   User Agent.  In such scenarios, it is desirable to have a mechanism
   whereby the SIP message can contain an indirect reference to the
   desired content.  The receiving party would then use this indirect
   reference to retrieve the content via a non-SIP transfer channel such
   as HTTP, FTP, or LDAP.

   The purpose of content indirection is purely to provide an
   alternative transport mechanism for SIP MIME body parts.  With the
   exception of the transport mechanism, indirected body parts are
   equivalent, and should have the same treatment, as in-line body
   parts.
















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3. Example Use Cases

   There are several example users of such a content indirection
   mechanism.  These are examples only and are not intended to limit the
   scope or applicability of the mechanism.

3.1 Presence Notification

   The information carried in a presence document could potentially
   exceed the recommended size for a SIP (NOTIFY) request, particularly
   if the document carries aggregated information from multiple
   endpoints.  In such a situation, it would be desirable to send the
   NOTIFY request with an indirect pointer to the presence document
   which could then be retrieved by, for example, HTTP.

   Figure 1: Example information flow for presence notification


             Watcher                 Presence Server
                |                           |
                |         SUBSCRIBE         |
                |-------------------------->|
                |          200 OK           |
                |<--------------------------|
                |                           |
                |          NOTIFY           |
                |-------------------------->|
                |          200 OK           |
                |<--------------------------|
                |                           |
                |      NOTIFY (w/URI)       |
                |<--------------------------|
                |           200             |
                |-------------------------->|
                |                           |
                |         HTTP GET          |
                |-------------------------->|
                |                           |
                | application/cpim-pidf+xml |
                |<--------------------------|
                |                           |



   In this example, the presence server returns an HTTP URI pointing to
   a presence document on the presence server which the watcher can then
   fetch using an HTTP GET.




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3.2 Document Sharing

   During an instant messaging conversation, a useful service is
   document sharing wherein one party sends an IM (MESSAGE request) with
   an indirect pointer to a document which is meant to be rendered by
   the remote party.  Carrying such a document directly in the MESSAGE
   request is not appropriate for most documents.  Furthermore, the
   document to be shared may reside on a completely independent server
   from the originating party.

   Figure 2: Example information flow for document sharing


               UAC                  UAS         Web Server
                |                    |                |
                |   MESSAGE w/URI    |                |
                |------------------->|                |
                |        200         |                |
                |<-------------------|                |
                |                    |                |
                |                    |    HTTP GET    |
                |                    |--------------->|
                |                    |   image/jpeg   |
                |                    |<---------------|
                |                    |                |



   In this example, a user wishes to exchange a JPEG image that she has
   stored on her web server with another user she has a IM conversation
   with.  The JPEG is intended to be rendered inline in the IM
   conversation.  The recepient of the MESSAGE request launches a HTTP
   GET request to the web server to retrieve the JPEG image.


















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4. Requirements

      It MUST be possible to specify the location of content via a URI
      [3].

      It MUST be possible to specify the disposition of each URI
      independently.

      It MUST be possible to label each URI to identify if and when the
      content referred to by that URI has changed.  Applications of this
      mechanism may send the same URI more than once.  The intention of
      this requirement is to allow the receiving party to determine if
      the content referenced by the URI has changed without having to
      actually retrieve that content.  Example ways the URI could be
      labelled include a sequence number, timestamp, version number,
      etc.

      It MUST be possible to specify the timespan for which a given URI
      is valid.  This may or may not be the same as the lifetime for the
      content itself.

      It MUST be possible for the UAC and the UAS to indicate support of
      this content indirection mechanism.  A fallback mechanism SHOULD
      be specified in the event that one of the parties is unable to
      support content indirection.

      It MUST be possible for the UAC and UAS to negotiate the type of
      the indirect content when using the content indirection mechanism.

      It MUST be possible for the UAC and UAS to negotiate support for
      URI scheme(s) to be used in the content indirection mechanism.
      This is in addition to the ability to negotiate the content type.

      It SHOULD be possible to ensure the integrity of the URI when it
      is received by the remote party.

      It MUST be possible to process the content indirection without
      human intervention.

      It MUST allow for indirect transference of content in any SIP
      message which would otherwise carry that content as a body.










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5. Security Considerations

   Any content indirection mechanism introduces additional security
   concerns.  By its nature, content indirection requires an extra
   processing step and information transfer.  There are a number of
   potential abuses of a content indirection mechanism:

      Content indirection allows the initiator to choose an alternative
      protocol with weaker security or known vulnerabilities for the
      content transfer.  For example, asking the recipient to issue an
      HTTP request which results in a Basic authentication challenge.

      Content indirection allows the initiator to ask the recipient to
      consume additional resources in the information transfer and
      content processing, potentially creating an avenue for denial of
      service attacks.  For example, an active FTP URL consuming 2
      connections for every indirect content message.

      Content indirection could be used as a form of port scanning
      attack where the indirect content URL is actually a bogus URL
      pointing to an internal resource of the recipient.  The response
      to the content indirection request could reveal information about
      open (and vulnerable) ports on these internal resources.

      A content indirection URL can disclose sensitive information about
      the initiator such as an internal user name (as part of an HTTP
      URL) or possibly geolocation information.

   Fortunately, all of these potential threats can be mitigated through
   careful screening of both the indirect content URIs that are received
   as well as those that are sent.  The clear requirement is that
   integrity and potentially privacy protection SHOULD be applied to the
   content indirection URI(s) in a SIP message.


















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References

   [1]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
        Levels", RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [2]  Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, Camarillo, Johnston, Peterson,
        Sparks, Handley and Schooler, "SIP: Session Initiation
        Protocol", RFC 3261, June 2002.

   [3]  Berners-Lee, Fielding and Masinter, "Uniform Resource
        Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax", RFC 2396, August 1996.


Author's Address

   Sean Olson
   Microsoft
   One Microsoft Way
   Redmond, WA  98052
   US

   Phone: +1-425-707-2846
   EMail: seanol@microsoft.com
   URI:   http://www.microsoft.com/rtc



























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Acknowledgement

   Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
   Internet Society.



















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