RFC 7030, "Enrollment over Secure Transport", October 2013

Note: This RFC has been updated by RFC 8951, RFC 8996

Errata ID: 5904
Status: Verified
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: Justin Cranford
Date Reported: 2019-11-12
Verifier Name: Roman Danyliw
Date Verified: 2020-11-13

Section 4.1.3 says:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

It should say:

Transfer-Encoding: base64

Notes:

Verifier Notes: Marked verified by the RFC Editor at the request of Roman Danyliw.
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Content-Transfer-Encoding is not a valid HTTP header. RFC 7030 is not compliant with RFC 2616.

- "MIME Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64" => Base64 Basic with CRLFs
- "HTTP Transfer-Encoding: base64" => Base64 Basic without CRLFs

This is traceable from RFC 7030 (EST) through RFC 2818 (TLS) to RFC 2616 (HTTP).

- RFC 7030 (EST): EST specifies how to transfer messages securely via HTTP over TLS (HTTPS) [RFC2818]
- RFC 2818 (TLS): HTTP [RFC2616] was originally used in the clear on the Internet.
- RFC 2616 (HTTP): HTTP does not use the Content-Transfer-Encoding (CTE) field of RFC 2045.
- RFC 2616 (HTTP): HTTP/1.1 introduces the Transfer-Encoding header field (section 14.41).

RFC 7030 sections affected are:

- All references to Content-Transfer-Encoding are not valid: Sections 4.1.3, 4.3.1, 4.3.2, 4.4.2, 4.5.2, A.1, A.2, A.3, and A.4.
- All references to RFC 2045 are not valid: Sections 4.1.3, 4.3.1, 4.3.2, 4.4.2, 4.5.2, and 7.1.
- All references to "base64" need to be updated or removed: Sections 3.5, 4.1.3, 4.3.1, 4.3.2, 4.4.2, 4.5.2, and 7.1.

RFC 7030 fix options:

Option #1: Change all references from Content-Transfer-Encoding to Transfer-Encoding. A caveat is that "base64" has a different meaning in HTTP (no CRLFs) vs MIME (includes CRLFs).

Option #2: Remove all references to Content-Transfer-Encoding and base64. Responses would be transmitted as binary. This allows the response to be transported more efficiently without base64 size bloat, and it allows optional use of Content-Length header so the response can be parsed more efficiently knowing the length ahead of time.

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