💾 Archived View for gemini.bortzmeyer.org › rfc-mirror › rfc7541.txt captured on 2024-03-21 at 17:17:08.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R. Peon
Request for Comments: 7541 Google, Inc
Category: Standards Track H. Ruellan
ISSN: 2070-1721 Canon CRF
May 2015
HPACK: Header Compression for HTTP/2
Abstract
This specification defines HPACK, a compression format for
efficiently representing HTTP header fields, to be used in HTTP/2.
Status of This Memo
This is an Internet Standards Track document.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on
Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7541.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2015 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
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................4
1.1. Overview ...................................................4
1.2. Conventions ................................................5
1.3. Terminology ................................................5
2. Compression Process Overview ....................................6
2.1. Header List Ordering .......................................6
2.2. Encoding and Decoding Contexts .............................6
2.3. Indexing Tables ............................................6
2.3.1. Static Table ........................................6
2.3.2. Dynamic Table .......................................6
2.3.3. Index Address Space .................................7
2.4. Header Field Representation ................................8
3. Header Block Decoding ...........................................8
3.1. Header Block Processing ....................................8
3.2. Header Field Representation Processing .....................9
4. Dynamic Table Management ........................................9
4.1. Calculating Table Size ....................................10
4.2. Maximum Table Size ........................................10
4.3. Entry Eviction When Dynamic Table Size Changes ............11
4.4. Entry Eviction When Adding New Entries ....................11
5. Primitive Type Representations .................................11
5.1. Integer Representation ....................................11
5.2. String Literal Representation .............................13
6. Binary Format ..................................................14
6.1. Indexed Header Field Representation .......................14
6.2. Literal Header Field Representation .......................15
6.2.1. Literal Header Field with Incremental Indexing .....15
6.2.2. Literal Header Field without Indexing ..............16
6.2.3. Literal Header Field Never Indexed .................17
6.3. Dynamic Table Size Update .................................18
7. Security Considerations ........................................19
7.1. Probing Dynamic Table State ...............................19
7.1.1. Applicability to HPACK and HTTP ....................20
7.1.2. Mitigation .........................................20
7.1.3. Never-Indexed Literals .............................21
7.2. Static Huffman Encoding ...................................22
7.3. Memory Consumption ........................................22
7.4. Implementation Limits .....................................23
8. References .....................................................23
8.1. Normative References ......................................23
8.2. Informative References ....................................24
Appendix A. Static Table Definition ...............................25
Appendix B. Huffman Code ..........................................27
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 2]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Appendix C. Examples ..............................................33
C.1. Integer Representation Examples ............................33
C.1.1. Example 1: Encoding 10 Using a 5-Bit Prefix ............33
C.1.2. Example 2: Encoding 1337 Using a 5-Bit Prefix ..........33
C.1.3. Example 3: Encoding 42 Starting at an Octet Boundary ...34
C.2. Header Field Representation Examples .......................34
C.2.1. Literal Header Field with Indexing .....................34
C.2.2. Literal Header Field without Indexing ..................35
C.2.3. Literal Header Field Never Indexed .....................36
C.2.4. Indexed Header Field ...................................37
C.3. Request Examples without Huffman Coding ....................37
C.3.1. First Request ..........................................37
C.3.2. Second Request .........................................38
C.3.3. Third Request ..........................................39
C.4. Request Examples with Huffman Coding .......................41
C.4.1. First Request ..........................................41
C.4.2. Second Request .........................................42
C.4.3. Third Request ..........................................43
C.5. Response Examples without Huffman Coding ...................45
C.5.1. First Response .........................................45
C.5.2. Second Response ........................................46
C.5.3. Third Response .........................................47
C.6. Response Examples with Huffman Coding ......................49
C.6.1. First Response .........................................49
C.6.2. Second Response ........................................51
C.6.3. Third Response .........................................52
Acknowledgments ...................................................55
Authors' Addresses ................................................55
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 3]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
1. Introduction
In HTTP/1.1 (see [RFC7230]), header fields are not compressed. As
web pages have grown to require dozens to hundreds of requests, the
redundant header fields in these requests unnecessarily consume
bandwidth, measurably increasing latency.
SPDY [SPDY] initially addressed this redundancy by compressing header
fields using the DEFLATE [DEFLATE] format, which proved very
effective at efficiently representing the redundant header fields.
However, that approach exposed a security risk as demonstrated by the
CRIME (Compression Ratio Info-leak Made Easy) attack (see [CRIME]).
This specification defines HPACK, a new compressor that eliminates
redundant header fields, limits vulnerability to known security
attacks, and has a bounded memory requirement for use in constrained
environments. Potential security concerns for HPACK are described in
Section 7.
The HPACK format is intentionally simple and inflexible. Both
characteristics reduce the risk of interoperability or security
issues due to implementation error. No extensibility mechanisms are
defined; changes to the format are only possible by defining a
complete replacement.
1.1. Overview
The format defined in this specification treats a list of header
fields as an ordered collection of name-value pairs that can include
duplicate pairs. Names and values are considered to be opaque
sequences of octets, and the order of header fields is preserved
after being compressed and decompressed.
Encoding is informed by header field tables that map header fields to
indexed values. These header field tables can be incrementally
updated as new header fields are encoded or decoded.
In the encoded form, a header field is represented either literally
or as a reference to a header field in one of the header field
tables. Therefore, a list of header fields can be encoded using a
mixture of references and literal values.
Literal values are either encoded directly or use a static Huffman
code.
The encoder is responsible for deciding which header fields to insert
as new entries in the header field tables. The decoder executes the
modifications to the header field tables prescribed by the encoder,
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 4]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
reconstructing the list of header fields in the process. This
enables decoders to remain simple and interoperate with a wide
variety of encoders.
Examples illustrating the use of these different mechanisms to
represent header fields are available in Appendix C.
1.2. Conventions
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 [RFC2119].
All numeric values are in network byte order. Values are unsigned
unless otherwise indicated. Literal values are provided in decimal
or hexadecimal as appropriate.
1.3. Terminology
This specification uses the following terms:
Header Field: A name-value pair. Both the name and value are
treated as opaque sequences of octets.
Dynamic Table: The dynamic table (see Section 2.3.2) is a table that
associates stored header fields with index values. This table is
dynamic and specific to an encoding or decoding context.
Static Table: The static table (see Section 2.3.1) is a table that
statically associates header fields that occur frequently with
index values. This table is ordered, read-only, always
accessible, and it may be shared amongst all encoding or decoding
contexts.
Header List: A header list is an ordered collection of header fields
that are encoded jointly and can contain duplicate header fields.
A complete list of header fields contained in an HTTP/2 header
block is a header list.
Header Field Representation: A header field can be represented in
encoded form either as a literal or as an index (see Section 2.4).
Header Block: An ordered list of header field representations,
which, when decoded, yields a complete header list.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 5]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
2. Compression Process Overview
This specification does not describe a specific algorithm for an
encoder. Instead, it defines precisely how a decoder is expected to
operate, allowing encoders to produce any encoding that this
definition permits.
2.1. Header List Ordering
HPACK preserves the ordering of header fields inside the header list.
An encoder MUST order header field representations in the header
block according to their ordering in the original header list. A
decoder MUST order header fields in the decoded header list according
to their ordering in the header block.
2.2. Encoding and Decoding Contexts
To decompress header blocks, a decoder only needs to maintain a
dynamic table (see Section 2.3.2) as a decoding context. No other
dynamic state is needed.
When used for bidirectional communication, such as in HTTP, the
encoding and decoding dynamic tables maintained by an endpoint are
completely independent, i.e., the request and response dynamic tables
are separate.
2.3. Indexing Tables
HPACK uses two tables for associating header fields to indexes. The
static table (see Section 2.3.1) is predefined and contains common
header fields (most of them with an empty value). The dynamic table
(see Section 2.3.2) is dynamic and can be used by the encoder to
index header fields repeated in the encoded header lists.
These two tables are combined into a single address space for
defining index values (see Section 2.3.3).
2.3.1. Static Table
The static table consists of a predefined static list of header
fields. Its entries are defined in Appendix A.
2.3.2. Dynamic Table
The dynamic table consists of a list of header fields maintained in
first-in, first-out order. The first and newest entry in a dynamic
table is at the lowest index, and the oldest entry of a dynamic table
is at the highest index.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 6]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
The dynamic table is initially empty. Entries are added as each
header block is decompressed.
The dynamic table can contain duplicate entries (i.e., entries with
the same name and same value). Therefore, duplicate entries MUST NOT
be treated as an error by a decoder.
The encoder decides how to update the dynamic table and as such can
control how much memory is used by the dynamic table. To limit the
memory requirements of the decoder, the dynamic table size is
strictly bounded (see Section 4.2).
The decoder updates the dynamic table during the processing of a list
of header field representations (see Section 3.2).
2.3.3. Index Address Space
The static table and the dynamic table are combined into a single
index address space.
Indices between 1 and the length of the static table (inclusive)
refer to elements in the static table (see Section 2.3.1).
Indices strictly greater than the length of the static table refer to
elements in the dynamic table (see Section 2.3.2). The length of the
static table is subtracted to find the index into the dynamic table.
Indices strictly greater than the sum of the lengths of both tables
MUST be treated as a decoding error.
For a static table size of s and a dynamic table size of k, the
following diagram shows the entire valid index address space.
<---------- Index Address Space ---------->
<-- Static Table --> <-- Dynamic Table -->
+---+-----------+---+ +---+-----------+---+
| 1 | ... | s | |s+1| ... |s+k|
+---+-----------+---+ +---+-----------+---+
^ |
| V
Insertion Point Dropping Point
Figure 1: Index Address Space
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 7]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
2.4. Header Field Representation
An encoded header field can be represented either as an index or as a
literal.
An indexed representation defines a header field as a reference to an
entry in either the static table or the dynamic table (see
Section 6.1).
A literal representation defines a header field by specifying its
name and value. The header field name can be represented literally
or as a reference to an entry in either the static table or the
dynamic table. The header field value is represented literally.
Three different literal representations are defined:
o A literal representation that adds the header field as a new entry
at the beginning of the dynamic table (see Section 6.2.1).
o A literal representation that does not add the header field to the
dynamic table (see Section 6.2.2).
o A literal representation that does not add the header field to the
dynamic table, with the additional stipulation that this header
field always use a literal representation, in particular when re-
encoded by an intermediary (see Section 6.2.3). This
representation is intended for protecting header field values that
are not to be put at risk by compressing them (see Section 7.1.3
for more details).
The selection of one of these literal representations can be guided
by security considerations, in order to protect sensitive header
field values (see Section 7.1).
The literal representation of a header field name or of a header
field value can encode the sequence of octets either directly or
using a static Huffman code (see Section 5.2).
3. Header Block Decoding
3.1. Header Block Processing
A decoder processes a header block sequentially to reconstruct the
original header list.
A header block is the concatenation of header field representations.
The different possible header field representations are described in
Section 6.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 8]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Once a header field is decoded and added to the reconstructed header
list, the header field cannot be removed. A header field added to
the header list can be safely passed to the application.
By passing the resulting header fields to the application, a decoder
can be implemented with minimal transitory memory commitment in
addition to the memory required for the dynamic table.
3.2. Header Field Representation Processing
The processing of a header block to obtain a header list is defined
in this section. To ensure that the decoding will successfully
produce a header list, a decoder MUST obey the following rules.
All the header field representations contained in a header block are
processed in the order in which they appear, as specified below.
Details on the formatting of the various header field representations
and some additional processing instructions are found in Section 6.
An _indexed representation_ entails the following actions:
o The header field corresponding to the referenced entry in either
the static table or dynamic table is appended to the decoded
header list.
A _literal representation_ that is _not added_ to the dynamic table
entails the following action:
o The header field is appended to the decoded header list.
A _literal representation_ that is _added_ to the dynamic table
entails the following actions:
o The header field is appended to the decoded header list.
o The header field is inserted at the beginning of the dynamic
table. This insertion could result in the eviction of previous
entries in the dynamic table (see Section 4.4).
4. Dynamic Table Management
To limit the memory requirements on the decoder side, the dynamic
table is constrained in size.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 9]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
4.1. Calculating Table Size
The size of the dynamic table is the sum of the size of its entries.
The size of an entry is the sum of its name's length in octets (as
defined in Section 5.2), its value's length in octets, and 32.
The size of an entry is calculated using the length of its name and
value without any Huffman encoding applied.
Note: The additional 32 octets account for an estimated overhead
associated with an entry. For example, an entry structure using
two 64-bit pointers to reference the name and the value of the
entry and two 64-bit integers for counting the number of
references to the name and value would have 32 octets of overhead.
4.2. Maximum Table Size
Protocols that use HPACK determine the maximum size that the encoder
is permitted to use for the dynamic table. In HTTP/2, this value is
determined by the SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE setting (see
Section 6.5.2 of [HTTP2]).
An encoder can choose to use less capacity than this maximum size
(see Section 6.3), but the chosen size MUST stay lower than or equal
to the maximum set by the protocol.
A change in the maximum size of the dynamic table is signaled via a
dynamic table size update (see Section 6.3). This dynamic table size
update MUST occur at the beginning of the first header block
following the change to the dynamic table size. In HTTP/2, this
follows a settings acknowledgment (see Section 6.5.3 of [HTTP2]).
Multiple updates to the maximum table size can occur between the
transmission of two header blocks. In the case that this size is
changed more than once in this interval, the smallest maximum table
size that occurs in that interval MUST be signaled in a dynamic table
size update. The final maximum size is always signaled, resulting in
at most two dynamic table size updates. This ensures that the
decoder is able to perform eviction based on reductions in dynamic
table size (see Section 4.3).
This mechanism can be used to completely clear entries from the
dynamic table by setting a maximum size of 0, which can subsequently
be restored.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 10]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
4.3. Entry Eviction When Dynamic Table Size Changes
Whenever the maximum size for the dynamic table is reduced, entries
are evicted from the end of the dynamic table until the size of the
dynamic table is less than or equal to the maximum size.
4.4. Entry Eviction When Adding New Entries
Before a new entry is added to the dynamic table, entries are evicted
from the end of the dynamic table until the size of the dynamic table
is less than or equal to (maximum size - new entry size) or until the
table is empty.
If the size of the new entry is less than or equal to the maximum
size, that entry is added to the table. It is not an error to
attempt to add an entry that is larger than the maximum size; an
attempt to add an entry larger than the maximum size causes the table
to be emptied of all existing entries and results in an empty table.
A new entry can reference the name of an entry in the dynamic table
that will be evicted when adding this new entry into the dynamic
table. Implementations are cautioned to avoid deleting the
referenced name if the referenced entry is evicted from the dynamic
table prior to inserting the new entry.
5. Primitive Type Representations
HPACK encoding uses two primitive types: unsigned variable-length
integers and strings of octets.
5.1. Integer Representation
Integers are used to represent name indexes, header field indexes, or
string lengths. An integer representation can start anywhere within
an octet. To allow for optimized processing, an integer
representation always finishes at the end of an octet.
An integer is represented in two parts: a prefix that fills the
current octet and an optional list of octets that are used if the
integer value does not fit within the prefix. The number of bits of
the prefix (called N) is a parameter of the integer representation.
If the integer value is small enough, i.e., strictly less than 2^N-1,
it is encoded within the N-bit prefix.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 11]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| ? | ? | ? | Value |
+---+---+---+-------------------+
Figure 2: Integer Value Encoded within the Prefix (Shown for N = 5)
Otherwise, all the bits of the prefix are set to 1, and the value,
decreased by 2^N-1, is encoded using a list of one or more octets.
The most significant bit of each octet is used as a continuation
flag: its value is set to 1 except for the last octet in the list.
The remaining bits of the octets are used to encode the decreased
value.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| ? | ? | ? | 1 1 1 1 1 |
+---+---+---+-------------------+
| 1 | Value-(2^N-1) LSB |
+---+---------------------------+
...
+---+---------------------------+
| 0 | Value-(2^N-1) MSB |
+---+---------------------------+
Figure 3: Integer Value Encoded after the Prefix (Shown for N = 5)
Decoding the integer value from the list of octets starts by
reversing the order of the octets in the list. Then, for each octet,
its most significant bit is removed. The remaining bits of the
octets are concatenated, and the resulting value is increased by
2^N-1 to obtain the integer value.
The prefix size, N, is always between 1 and 8 bits. An integer
starting at an octet boundary will have an 8-bit prefix.
Pseudocode to represent an integer I is as follows:
if I < 2^N - 1, encode I on N bits
else
encode (2^N - 1) on N bits
I = I - (2^N - 1)
while I >= 128
encode (I % 128 + 128) on 8 bits
I = I / 128
encode I on 8 bits
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 12]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Pseudocode to decode an integer I is as follows:
decode I from the next N bits
if I < 2^N - 1, return I
else
M = 0
repeat
B = next octet
I = I + (B & 127) * 2^M
M = M + 7
while B & 128 == 128
return I
Examples illustrating the encoding of integers are available in
Appendix C.1.
This integer representation allows for values of indefinite size. It
is also possible for an encoder to send a large number of zero
values, which can waste octets and could be used to overflow integer
values. Integer encodings that exceed implementation limits -- in
value or octet length -- MUST be treated as decoding errors.
Different limits can be set for each of the different uses of
integers, based on implementation constraints.
5.2. String Literal Representation
Header field names and header field values can be represented as
string literals. A string literal is encoded as a sequence of
octets, either by directly encoding the string literal's octets or by
using a Huffman code (see [HUFFMAN]).
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| H | String Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| String Data (Length octets) |
+-------------------------------+
Figure 4: String Literal Representation
A string literal representation contains the following fields:
H: A one-bit flag, H, indicating whether or not the octets of the
string are Huffman encoded.
String Length: The number of octets used to encode the string
literal, encoded as an integer with a 7-bit prefix (see
Section 5.1).
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 13]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
String Data: The encoded data of the string literal. If H is '0',
then the encoded data is the raw octets of the string literal. If
H is '1', then the encoded data is the Huffman encoding of the
string literal.
String literals that use Huffman encoding are encoded with the
Huffman code defined in Appendix B (see examples for requests in
Appendix C.4 and for responses in Appendix C.6). The encoded data is
the bitwise concatenation of the codes corresponding to each octet of
the string literal.
As the Huffman-encoded data doesn't always end at an octet boundary,
some padding is inserted after it, up to the next octet boundary. To
prevent this padding from being misinterpreted as part of the string
literal, the most significant bits of the code corresponding to the
EOS (end-of-string) symbol are used.
Upon decoding, an incomplete code at the end of the encoded data is
to be considered as padding and discarded. A padding strictly longer
than 7 bits MUST be treated as a decoding error. A padding not
corresponding to the most significant bits of the code for the EOS
symbol MUST be treated as a decoding error. A Huffman-encoded string
literal containing the EOS symbol MUST be treated as a decoding
error.
6. Binary Format
This section describes the detailed format of each of the different
header field representations and the dynamic table size update
instruction.
6.1. Indexed Header Field Representation
An indexed header field representation identifies an entry in either
the static table or the dynamic table (see Section 2.3).
An indexed header field representation causes a header field to be
added to the decoded header list, as described in Section 3.2.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 1 | Index (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
Figure 5: Indexed Header Field
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 14]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
An indexed header field starts with the '1' 1-bit pattern, followed
by the index of the matching header field, represented as an integer
with a 7-bit prefix (see Section 5.1).
The index value of 0 is not used. It MUST be treated as a decoding
error if found in an indexed header field representation.
6.2. Literal Header Field Representation
A literal header field representation contains a literal header field
value. Header field names are provided either as a literal or by
reference to an existing table entry, either from the static table or
the dynamic table (see Section 2.3).
This specification defines three forms of literal header field
representations: with indexing, without indexing, and never indexed.
6.2.1. Literal Header Field with Incremental Indexing
A literal header field with incremental indexing representation
results in appending a header field to the decoded header list and
inserting it as a new entry into the dynamic table.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 1 | Index (6+) |
+---+---+-----------------------+
| H | Value Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Value String (Length octets) |
+-------------------------------+
Figure 6: Literal Header Field with Incremental Indexing -- Indexed
Name
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 15]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 1 | 0 |
+---+---+-----------------------+
| H | Name Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Name String (Length octets) |
+---+---------------------------+
| H | Value Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Value String (Length octets) |
+-------------------------------+
Figure 7: Literal Header Field with Incremental Indexing -- New Name
A literal header field with incremental indexing representation
starts with the '01' 2-bit pattern.
If the header field name matches the header field name of an entry
stored in the static table or the dynamic table, the header field
name can be represented using the index of that entry. In this case,
the index of the entry is represented as an integer with a 6-bit
prefix (see Section 5.1). This value is always non-zero.
Otherwise, the header field name is represented as a string literal
(see Section 5.2). A value 0 is used in place of the 6-bit index,
followed by the header field name.
Either form of header field name representation is followed by the
header field value represented as a string literal (see Section 5.2).
6.2.2. Literal Header Field without Indexing
A literal header field without indexing representation results in
appending a header field to the decoded header list without altering
the dynamic table.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Index (4+) |
+---+---+-----------------------+
| H | Value Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Value String (Length octets) |
+-------------------------------+
Figure 8: Literal Header Field without Indexing -- Indexed Name
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 16]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
+---+---+-----------------------+
| H | Name Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Name String (Length octets) |
+---+---------------------------+
| H | Value Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Value String (Length octets) |
+-------------------------------+
Figure 9: Literal Header Field without Indexing -- New Name
A literal header field without indexing representation starts with
the '0000' 4-bit pattern.
If the header field name matches the header field name of an entry
stored in the static table or the dynamic table, the header field
name can be represented using the index of that entry. In this case,
the index of the entry is represented as an integer with a 4-bit
prefix (see Section 5.1). This value is always non-zero.
Otherwise, the header field name is represented as a string literal
(see Section 5.2). A value 0 is used in place of the 4-bit index,
followed by the header field name.
Either form of header field name representation is followed by the
header field value represented as a string literal (see Section 5.2).
6.2.3. Literal Header Field Never Indexed
A literal header field never-indexed representation results in
appending a header field to the decoded header list without altering
the dynamic table. Intermediaries MUST use the same representation
for encoding this header field.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | Index (4+) |
+---+---+-----------------------+
| H | Value Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Value String (Length octets) |
+-------------------------------+
Figure 10: Literal Header Field Never Indexed -- Indexed Name
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 17]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
+---+---+-----------------------+
| H | Name Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Name String (Length octets) |
+---+---------------------------+
| H | Value Length (7+) |
+---+---------------------------+
| Value String (Length octets) |
+-------------------------------+
Figure 11: Literal Header Field Never Indexed -- New Name
A literal header field never-indexed representation starts with the
'0001' 4-bit pattern.
When a header field is represented as a literal header field never
indexed, it MUST always be encoded with this specific literal
representation. In particular, when a peer sends a header field that
it received represented as a literal header field never indexed, it
MUST use the same representation to forward this header field.
This representation is intended for protecting header field values
that are not to be put at risk by compressing them (see Section 7.1
for more details).
The encoding of the representation is identical to the literal header
field without indexing (see Section 6.2.2).
6.3. Dynamic Table Size Update
A dynamic table size update signals a change to the size of the
dynamic table.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 0 | 1 | Max size (5+) |
+---+---------------------------+
Figure 12: Maximum Dynamic Table Size Change
A dynamic table size update starts with the '001' 3-bit pattern,
followed by the new maximum size, represented as an integer with a
5-bit prefix (see Section 5.1).
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 18]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
The new maximum size MUST be lower than or equal to the limit
determined by the protocol using HPACK. A value that exceeds this
limit MUST be treated as a decoding error. In HTTP/2, this limit is
the last value of the SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE parameter (see
Section 6.5.2 of [HTTP2]) received from the decoder and acknowledged
by the encoder (see Section 6.5.3 of [HTTP2]).
Reducing the maximum size of the dynamic table can cause entries to
be evicted (see Section 4.3).
7. Security Considerations
This section describes potential areas of security concern with
HPACK:
o Use of compression as a length-based oracle for verifying guesses
about secrets that are compressed into a shared compression
context.
o Denial of service resulting from exhausting processing or memory
capacity at a decoder.
7.1. Probing Dynamic Table State
HPACK reduces the length of header field encodings by exploiting the
redundancy inherent in protocols like HTTP. The ultimate goal of
this is to reduce the amount of data that is required to send HTTP
requests or responses.
The compression context used to encode header fields can be probed by
an attacker who can both define header fields to be encoded and
transmitted and observe the length of those fields once they are
encoded. When an attacker can do both, they can adaptively modify
requests in order to confirm guesses about the dynamic table state.
If a guess is compressed into a shorter length, the attacker can
observe the encoded length and infer that the guess was correct.
This is possible even over the Transport Layer Security (TLS)
protocol (see [TLS12]), because while TLS provides confidentiality
protection for content, it only provides a limited amount of
protection for the length of that content.
Note: Padding schemes only provide limited protection against an
attacker with these capabilities, potentially only forcing an
increased number of guesses to learn the length associated with a
given guess. Padding schemes also work directly against
compression by increasing the number of bits that are transmitted.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 19]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Attacks like CRIME [CRIME] demonstrated the existence of these
general attacker capabilities. The specific attack exploited the
fact that DEFLATE [DEFLATE] removes redundancy based on prefix
matching. This permitted the attacker to confirm guesses a character
at a time, reducing an exponential-time attack into a linear-time
attack.
7.1.1. Applicability to HPACK and HTTP
HPACK mitigates but does not completely prevent attacks modeled on
CRIME [CRIME] by forcing a guess to match an entire header field
value rather than individual characters. Attackers can only learn
whether a guess is correct or not, so they are reduced to brute-force
guesses for the header field values.
The viability of recovering specific header field values therefore
depends on the entropy of values. As a result, values with high
entropy are unlikely to be recovered successfully. However, values
with low entropy remain vulnerable.
Attacks of this nature are possible any time that two mutually
distrustful entities control requests or responses that are placed
onto a single HTTP/2 connection. If the shared HPACK compressor
permits one entity to add entries to the dynamic table and the other
to access those entries, then the state of the table can be learned.
Having requests or responses from mutually distrustful entities
occurs when an intermediary either:
o sends requests from multiple clients on a single connection toward
an origin server, or
o takes responses from multiple origin servers and places them on a
shared connection toward a client.
Web browsers also need to assume that requests made on the same
connection by different web origins [ORIGIN] are made by mutually
distrustful entities.
7.1.2. Mitigation
Users of HTTP that require confidentiality for header fields can use
values with entropy sufficient to make guessing infeasible. However,
this is impractical as a general solution because it forces all users
of HTTP to take steps to mitigate attacks. It would impose new
constraints on how HTTP is used.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 20]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Rather than impose constraints on users of HTTP, an implementation of
HPACK can instead constrain how compression is applied in order to
limit the potential for dynamic table probing.
An ideal solution segregates access to the dynamic table based on the
entity that is constructing header fields. Header field values that
are added to the table are attributed to an entity, and only the
entity that created a particular value can extract that value.
To improve compression performance of this option, certain entries
might be tagged as being public. For example, a web browser might
make the values of the Accept-Encoding header field available in all
requests.
An encoder without good knowledge of the provenance of header fields
might instead introduce a penalty for a header field with many
different values, such that a large number of attempts to guess a
header field value results in the header field no longer being
compared to the dynamic table entries in future messages, effectively
preventing further guesses.
Note: Simply removing entries corresponding to the header field
from the dynamic table can be ineffectual if the attacker has a
reliable way of causing values to be reinstalled. For example, a
request to load an image in a web browser typically includes the
Cookie header field (a potentially highly valued target for this
sort of attack), and web sites can easily force an image to be
loaded, thereby refreshing the entry in the dynamic table.
This response might be made inversely proportional to the length of
the header field value. Marking a header field as not using the
dynamic table anymore might occur for shorter values more quickly or
with higher probability than for longer values.
7.1.3. Never-Indexed Literals
Implementations can also choose to protect sensitive header fields by
not compressing them and instead encoding their value as literals.
Refusing to generate an indexed representation for a header field is
only effective if compression is avoided on all hops. The never-
indexed literal (see Section 6.2.3) can be used to signal to
intermediaries that a particular value was intentionally sent as a
literal.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 21]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
An intermediary MUST NOT re-encode a value that uses the never-
indexed literal representation with another representation that would
index it. If HPACK is used for re-encoding, the never-indexed
literal representation MUST be used.
The choice to use a never-indexed literal representation for a header
field depends on several factors. Since HPACK doesn't protect
against guessing an entire header field value, short or low-entropy
values are more readily recovered by an adversary. Therefore, an
encoder might choose not to index values with low entropy.
An encoder might also choose not to index values for header fields
that are considered to be highly valuable or sensitive to recovery,
such as the Cookie or Authorization header fields.
On the contrary, an encoder might prefer indexing values for header
fields that have little or no value if they were exposed. For
instance, a User-Agent header field does not commonly vary between
requests and is sent to any server. In that case, confirmation that
a particular User-Agent value has been used provides little value.
Note that these criteria for deciding to use a never-indexed literal
representation will evolve over time as new attacks are discovered.
7.2. Static Huffman Encoding
There is no currently known attack against a static Huffman encoding.
A study has shown that using a static Huffman encoding table created
an information leakage; however, this same study concluded that an
attacker could not take advantage of this information leakage to
recover any meaningful amount of information (see [PETAL]).
7.3. Memory Consumption
An attacker can try to cause an endpoint to exhaust its memory.
HPACK is designed to limit both the peak and state amounts of memory
allocated by an endpoint.
The amount of memory used by the compressor is limited by the
protocol using HPACK through the definition of the maximum size of
the dynamic table. In HTTP/2, this value is controlled by the
decoder through the setting parameter SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE (see
Section 6.5.2 of [HTTP2]). This limit takes into account both the
size of the data stored in the dynamic table, plus a small allowance
for overhead.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 22]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
A decoder can limit the amount of state memory used by setting an
appropriate value for the maximum size of the dynamic table. In
HTTP/2, this is realized by setting an appropriate value for the
SETTINGS_HEADER_TABLE_SIZE parameter. An encoder can limit the
amount of state memory it uses by signaling a lower dynamic table
size than the decoder allows (see Section 6.3).
The amount of temporary memory consumed by an encoder or decoder can
be limited by processing header fields sequentially. An
implementation does not need to retain a complete list of header
fields. Note, however, that it might be necessary for an application
to retain a complete header list for other reasons; even though HPACK
does not force this to occur, application constraints might make this
necessary.
7.4. Implementation Limits
An implementation of HPACK needs to ensure that large values for
integers, long encoding for integers, or long string literals do not
create security weaknesses.
An implementation has to set a limit for the values it accepts for
integers, as well as for the encoded length (see Section 5.1). In
the same way, it has to set a limit to the length it accepts for
string literals (see Section 5.2).
8. References
8.1. Normative References
[HTTP2] Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)", RFC 7540,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7540, May 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7540>.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC7230] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and
Routing", RFC 7230, DOI 10.17487/RFC7230, June 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7230>.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 23]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
8.2. Informative References
[CANONICAL] Schwartz, E. and B. Kallick, "Generating a canonical
prefix encoding", Communications of the ACM, Volume 7
Issue 3, pp. 166-169, March 1964, <https://dl.acm.org/
citation.cfm?id=363991>.
[CRIME] Wikipedia, "CRIME", May 2015, <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/
index.php?title=CRIME&oldid=660948120>.
[DEFLATE] Deutsch, P., "DEFLATE Compressed Data Format
Specification version 1.3", RFC 1951,
DOI 10.17487/RFC1951, May 1996,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1951>.
[HUFFMAN] Huffman, D., "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-
Redundancy Codes", Proceedings of the Institute of Radio
Engineers, Volume 40, Number 9, pp. 1098-1101, September
1952, <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/
articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=4051119>.
[ORIGIN] Barth, A., "The Web Origin Concept", RFC 6454,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6454, December 2011,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6454>.
[PETAL] Tan, J. and J. Nahata, "PETAL: Preset Encoding
Table Information Leakage", April 2013,
<http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/associated/
CMU-PDL-13-106.pdf>.
[SPDY] Belshe, M. and R. Peon, "SPDY Protocol", Work in
Progress, draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00, February 2012.
[TLS12] Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
(TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5246, August 2008,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5246>.
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 24]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Appendix A. Static Table Definition
The static table (see Section 2.3.1) consists in a predefined and
unchangeable list of header fields.
The static table was created from the most frequent header fields
used by popular web sites, with the addition of HTTP/2-specific
pseudo-header fields (see Section 8.1.2.1 of [HTTP2]). For header
fields with a few frequent values, an entry was added for each of
these frequent values. For other header fields, an entry was added
with an empty value.
Table 1 lists the predefined header fields that make up the static
table and gives the index of each entry.
+-------+-----------------------------+---------------+
| Index | Header Name | Header Value |
+-------+-----------------------------+---------------+
| 1 | :authority | |
| 2 | :method | GET |
| 3 | :method | POST |
| 4 | :path | / |
| 5 | :path | /index.html |
| 6 | :scheme | http |
| 7 | :scheme | https |
| 8 | :status | 200 |
| 9 | :status | 204 |
| 10 | :status | 206 |
| 11 | :status | 304 |
| 12 | :status | 400 |
| 13 | :status | 404 |
| 14 | :status | 500 |
| 15 | accept-charset | |
| 16 | accept-encoding | gzip, deflate |
| 17 | accept-language | |
| 18 | accept-ranges | |
| 19 | accept | |
| 20 | access-control-allow-origin | |
| 21 | age | |
| 22 | allow | |
| 23 | authorization | |
| 24 | cache-control | |
| 25 | content-disposition | |
| 26 | content-encoding | |
| 27 | content-language | |
| 28 | content-length | |
| 29 | content-location | |
| 30 | content-range | |
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 25]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
| 31 | content-type | |
| 32 | cookie | |
| 33 | date | |
| 34 | etag | |
| 35 | expect | |
| 36 | expires | |
| 37 | from | |
| 38 | host | |
| 39 | if-match | |
| 40 | if-modified-since | |
| 41 | if-none-match | |
| 42 | if-range | |
| 43 | if-unmodified-since | |
| 44 | last-modified | |
| 45 | link | |
| 46 | location | |
| 47 | max-forwards | |
| 48 | proxy-authenticate | |
| 49 | proxy-authorization | |
| 50 | range | |
| 51 | referer | |
| 52 | refresh | |
| 53 | retry-after | |
| 54 | server | |
| 55 | set-cookie | |
| 56 | strict-transport-security | |
| 57 | transfer-encoding | |
| 58 | user-agent | |
| 59 | vary | |
| 60 | via | |
| 61 | www-authenticate | |
+-------+-----------------------------+---------------+
Table 1: Static Table Entries
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 26]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
Appendix B. Huffman Code
The following Huffman code is used when encoding string literals with
a Huffman coding (see Section 5.2).
This Huffman code was generated from statistics obtained on a large
sample of HTTP headers. It is a canonical Huffman code (see
[CANONICAL]) with some tweaking to ensure that no symbol has a unique
code length.
Each row in the table defines the code used to represent a symbol:
sym: The symbol to be represented. It is the decimal value of an
octet, possibly prepended with its ASCII representation. A
specific symbol, "EOS", is used to indicate the end of a string
literal.
code as bits: The Huffman code for the symbol represented as a
base-2 integer, aligned on the most significant bit (MSB).
code as hex: The Huffman code for the symbol, represented as a
hexadecimal integer, aligned on the least significant bit (LSB).
len: The number of bits for the code representing the symbol.
As an example, the code for the symbol 47 (corresponding to the ASCII
character "/") consists in the 6 bits "0", "1", "1", "0", "0", "0".
This corresponds to the value 0x18 (in hexadecimal) encoded in 6
bits.
code
code as bits as hex len
sym aligned to MSB aligned in
to LSB bits
( 0) |11111111|11000 1ff8 [13]
( 1) |11111111|11111111|1011000 7fffd8 [23]
( 2) |11111111|11111111|11111110|0010 fffffe2 [28]
( 3) |11111111|11111111|11111110|0011 fffffe3 [28]
( 4) |11111111|11111111|11111110|0100 fffffe4 [28]
( 5) |11111111|11111111|11111110|0101 fffffe5 [28]
( 6) |11111111|11111111|11111110|0110 fffffe6 [28]
( 7) |11111111|11111111|11111110|0111 fffffe7 [28]
( 8) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1000 fffffe8 [28]
( 9) |11111111|11111111|11101010 ffffea [24]
( 10) |11111111|11111111|11111111|111100 3ffffffc [30]
( 11) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1001 fffffe9 [28]
( 12) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1010 fffffea [28]
( 13) |11111111|11111111|11111111|111101 3ffffffd [30]
Peon & Ruellan Standards Track [Page 27]
RFC 7541 HPACK May 2015
( 14) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1011 fffffeb [28]
( 15) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1100 fffffec [28]
( 16) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1101 fffffed [28]
( 17) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1110 fffffee [28]
( 18) |11111111|11111111|11111110|1111 fffffef [28]
( 19) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0000 ffffff0 [28]
( 20) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0001 ffffff1 [28]
( 21) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0010 ffffff2 [28]
( 22) |11111111|11111111|11111111|111110 3ffffffe [30]
( 23) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0011 ffffff3 [28]
( 24) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0100 ffffff4 [28]
( 25) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0101 ffffff5 [28]
( 26) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0110 ffffff6 [28]
( 27) |11111111|11111111|11111111|0111 ffffff7 [28]
( 28) |11111111|11111111|11111111|1000 ffffff8 [28]
( 29) |11111111|11111111|11111111|1001 ffffff9 [28]
( 30) |11111111|11111111|11111111|1010 ffffffa [28]
( 31) |11111111|11111111|11111111|1011 ffffffb [28]
' ' ( 32) |010100 14 [ 6]
'!' ( 33) |11111110|00 3f8 [10]
'"' ( 34) |11111110|01 3f9 [10]
'#' ( 35) |11111111|1010 ffa [12]
'