RFC 9729: The Concealed HTTP Authentication Scheme
- D. Schinazi,
- D. Oliver,
- J. Hoyland
Abstract
Most HTTP authentication schemes are probeable in the sense that it is possible
for an unauthenticated client to probe whether an origin serves resources that
require authentication. It is possible for an origin to hide the fact that it
requires authentication by not generating Unauthorized status codes; however,
that only works with non
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 7841.¶
Information about the current status of this document, any
errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2025 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://
1. Introduction
HTTP authentication schemes (see Section 11 of [HTTP]) allow origins
to restrict access for some resources to only authenticated requests. While
these schemes commonly involve a challenge where the origin asks the client to
provide authentication information, it is possible for clients to send such
information unprompted. This is particularly useful in cases where an origin
wants to offer a service or capability only to "those who know", while all
others are given no indication the service or capability exists. Such designs
rely on an externally defined mechanism by which keys are distributed. For
example, a company might offer remote employee access to company services
directly via its website using their employee credentials or offer access to
limited special capabilities for specific employees while making discovering
(or probing for) such capabilities difficult. As another example, members of
less well-defined communities might use more ephemeral keys to acquire access
to geography- or capability
While digital
1.1. Conventions and Definitions
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.¶
This document uses the notation from Section 1.3 of [QUIC].¶
Various examples in this document contain long lines that may be folded, as described in [RFC8792].¶
2. The Concealed HTTP Authentication Scheme
This document defines the "Concealed" HTTP authentication scheme. It uses asymmetric cryptography. Clients possess a key ID and a public/private key pair, and origin servers maintain a mapping of authorized key IDs to associated public keys.¶
The client uses a TLS keying material exporter to generate data to be signed
(see Section 3) then sends the signature using the Authorization (or
Proxy
3. Client Handling
When a client wishes to use the Concealed HTTP authentication scheme with a request, it SHALL compute the authentication proof using a TLS keying material exporter with the following parameters:¶
Note that TLS 1.3 keying material exporters are defined in Section 7.5 of [TLS], while TLS 1.2 keying material exporters are defined in [KEY-EXPORT].¶
3.1. Key Exporter Context
The TLS key exporter context is described in Figure 1, using the notation from Section 1.3 of [QUIC]:¶
The key exporter context contains the following fields:¶
- Signature Algorithm:
-
The signature scheme sent in the
sParameter (see Section 4.4).¶ - Key ID:
-
The key ID sent in the
kParameter (see Section 4.1).¶ - Public Key:
-
The public key used by the server to validate the signature provided by the client. Its encoding is described in Section 3.1.1.¶
- Scheme:
-
The scheme for this request, encoded using the format of the scheme portion of a URI as defined in Section 3.1 of [URI].¶
- Host:
-
The host for this request, encoded using the format of the host portion of a URI as defined in Section 3.2.2 of [URI].¶
- Port:
-
The port for this request, encoded in network byte order. Note that the port is either included in the URI or is the default port for the scheme in use; see Section 3.2.3 of [URI].¶
- Realm:
-
The realm of authentication that is sent in the realm authentication parameter (see Section 11.5 of [HTTP]). If the realm authentication parameter is not present, this SHALL be empty. This document does not define a means for the origin to communicate a realm to the client. If a client is not configured to use a specific realm, it SHALL use an empty realm and SHALL NOT send the realm authentication parameter.¶
The Signature Algorithm and Port fields are encoded as unsigned 16-bit integers in network byte order. The Key ID, Public Key, Scheme, Host, and Realm fields are length-prefixed strings; they are preceded by a Length field that represents their length in bytes. These length fields are encoded using the variable-length integer encoding from Section 16 of [QUIC] and MUST be encoded in the minimum number of bytes necessary.¶
3.1.1. Public Key Encoding
Both the "Public Key" field of the TLS key exporter context (see above) and the
a Parameter (see Section 4.2) carry the same public key. The encoding of
the public key is determined by the signature algorithm in use as follows:¶
- RSASSA-PSS algorithms:
-
The public key is an RSAPublicKey structure [PKCS1] encoded in DER [X.690]. BER encodings that are not DER MUST be rejected.¶
- ECDSA algorithms:
-
The public key is an Uncompressed
Point Representation structure defined in Section 4.2.8.2 of [TLS], using the curve specified by the Signature Scheme .¶ - EdDSA algorithms:
-
The public key is the byte string encoding defined in [EdDSA].¶
This document does not define the public key encodings for other algorithms. In order for a SignatureScheme to be usable with the Concealed HTTP authentication scheme, its public key encoding needs to be defined in a corresponding document.¶
3.2. Key Exporter Output
The key exporter output is 48 bytes long. Of those, the first 32 bytes are part of the input to the signature and the next 16 bytes are sent alongside the signature. This allows the recipient to confirm that the exporter produces the right values. This is described in Figure 2, using the notation from Section 1.3 of [QUIC]:¶
The key exporter output contains the following fields:¶
- Signature Input:
-
This is part of the data signed using the client's chosen asymmetric private key (see Section 3.3).¶
- Verification:
-
The verification is transmitted to the server using the
vParameter (see Section 4.5).¶
3.3. Signature Computation
Once the Signature Input has been extracted from the key exporter output (see Section 3.2), it is prefixed with static data before being signed. The signature is computed over the concatenation of:¶
For example, if the Signature Input has all its 32 bytes set to 01, the content covered by the signature (in hexadecimal format) would be:¶
The purpose of this static prefix is to mitigate issues that could arise if
authentication asymmetric keys were accidentally reused across protocols (even
though this is forbidden, see Section 8). This construction mirrors that of
the TLS 1.3 Certificate
The resulting signature is then transmitted to the server using the p
Parameter (see Section 4.3).¶
4. Authentication Parameters
This specification defines the following authentication parameters.¶
All of the byte sequences below are encoded using base64url (see Section 5 of [BASE64]) without quotes and without padding. In other words, the values of these byte-sequence authentication parameters MUST NOT include any characters other than ASCII letters, digits, dash, and underscore.¶
The integer below is encoded without a minus and without leading zeroes. In other words, the value of this integer authentication parameter MUST NOT include any characters other than digits and MUST NOT start with a zero unless the full value is "0".¶
Using the syntax from [ABNF]:¶
4.1. The k Parameter
The REQUIRED "k" (key ID) Parameter is a byte sequence that identifies which key the client wishes to use to authenticate. This is used by the backend to point to an entry in a server-side database of known keys (see Section 6.3).¶
4.2. The a Parameter
The REQUIRED "a" (public key) Parameter is a byte sequence that specifies the public key used by the server to validate the signature provided by the client. This avoids key confusion issues (see [SEEMS-LEGIT]). The encoding of the public key is described in Section 3.1.1.¶
4.3. The p Parameter
The REQUIRED "p" (proof) Parameter is a byte sequence that specifies the proof that the client provides to attest to possessing the credential that matches its key ID.¶
4.4. The s Parameter
The REQUIRED "s" (signature scheme) Parameter is an integer that specifies the
signature scheme used to compute the proof transmitted in the p Parameter.
Its value is an integer between 0 and 65535 inclusive from the IANA "TLS
Signature
4.5. The v Parameter
The REQUIRED "v" (verification) Parameter is a byte sequence that specifies the verification that the client provides to attest to possessing the key exporter output (see Section 3.2 for details). This avoids issues with signature schemes where certain keys can generate signatures that are valid for multiple inputs (see [SEEMS-LEGIT]).¶
5. Example
For example, a client using the key ID "basement" and the signature algorithm Ed25519 [ED25519] could produce the following header field:¶
6. Server Handling
In this section, we subdivide the server role in two:¶
In most deployments, we expect both the frontend and backend roles to be implemented in a single HTTP origin server (as defined in Section 3.6 of [HTTP]). However, these roles can be split such that the frontend is an HTTP gateway (as defined in Section 3.7 of [HTTP]) and the backend is an HTTP origin server.¶
6.1. Frontend Handling
If a frontend is configured to check the Concealed HTTP authentication scheme, it
will parse the Authorization (or Proxy
The frontend then uses the data from these authentication parameters to compute the key exporter output, as defined in Section 3.2. The frontend then shares the header field and the key exporter output with the backend.¶
6.2. Communication Between Frontend and Backend
If the frontend and backend roles are implemented in the same machine, this can be handled by a simple function call.¶
If the roles are split between two separate HTTP servers, then the backend
won't be able to directly access the TLS keying material exporter from the TLS
connection between the client and frontend, so the frontend needs to explicitly
send it. This document defines the "Concealed
The frontend SHALL forward the HTTP request to the backend, including the
original unmodified Authorization (or Proxy
Note that, since the security of this mechanism requires the key exporter
output to be correct, backends need to trust frontends to send it truthfully.
This trust relationship is common because the frontend already needs access to
the TLS certificate private key in order to respond to requests. HTTP servers
that parse the Concealed
6.3. Backend Handling
Once the backend receives the Authorization (or Proxy
If all of these checks succeed, the backend can consider the request to be properly authenticated and can reply accordingly (the backend can also forward the request to another HTTP server).¶
If any of the above checks fail, the backend MUST treat it as if the
Authorization (or Proxy
6.4. Non-Probeable Server Handling
Servers that wish to introduce resources whose existence cannot be probed need to ensure that they do not reveal any information about those resources to unauthenticated clients. In particular, such servers MUST respond to authentication failures with the exact same response that they would have used for nonexistent resources. For example, this can mean using HTTP status code 404 (Not Found) instead of 401 (Unauthorized).¶
The authentication checks described above can take time to compute, and an attacker could detect use of this mechanism if that time is observable by comparing the timing of a request for a known nonexistent resource to the timing of a request for a potentially authenticated resource. Servers can mitigate this observability by slightly delaying responses to some nonexistent resources such that the timing of the authentication verification is not observable. This delay needs to be carefully considered to avoid having the delay itself leak the fact that this origin uses this mechanism at all.¶
Non-probeable resources also need to be non
7. Requirements on TLS Usage
This authentication scheme is only defined for uses of HTTP with TLS [TLS]. This includes any use of HTTP over TLS as typically used for HTTP/2 [HTTP/2], or HTTP/3 [HTTP/3] where the transport protocol uses TLS as its authentication and key exchange mechanism [QUIC-TLS].¶
Because the TLS keying material exporter is only secure for authentication when it is uniquely bound to the TLS session [RFC7627], the Concealed authentication scheme requires either one of the following properties:¶
Clients MUST NOT use the Concealed HTTP authentication scheme on connections that do not meet one of the two properties above. If a server receives a request that uses this authentication scheme on a connection that meets neither of the above properties, the server MUST treat the request as if the authentication were not present.¶
8. Security Considerations
The Concealed HTTP authentication scheme allows a client to authenticate to an origin server while guaranteeing freshness and without the need for the server to transmit a nonce to the client. This allows the server to accept authenticated clients without revealing that it supports or expects authentication for some resources. It also allows authentication without the client leaking the presence of authentication to observers due to cleartext TLS Client Hello extensions.¶
Since the freshness described above is provided by a TLS key exporter, it can be as old as the underlying TLS connection. Servers can require better freshness by forcing clients to create new connections using mechanisms such as the GOAWAY frame (see Section 5.2 of [HTTP/3]).¶
The authentication proofs described in this document are not bound to individual HTTP requests; if the key is used for authentication proofs on multiple requests on the same connection, they will all be identical. This allows for better compression when sending over the wire, but it implies that client implementations that multiplex different security contexts over a single HTTP connection need to ensure that those contexts cannot read each other's header fields. Otherwise, one context would be able to replay the Authorization header field of another. This constraint is met by modern web browsers. If an attacker were to compromise the browser such that it could access another context's memory, the attacker might also be able to access the corresponding key, so binding authentication to requests would not provide much benefit in practice.¶
Authentication asymmetric keys used for the Concealed HTTP authentication scheme MUST NOT be reused in other protocols. Even though we attempt to mitigate these issues by adding a static prefix to the signed data (see Section 3.3), reusing keys could undermine the security guarantees of the authentication.¶
Origins offering this scheme can link requests that use the same key. However, requests are not linkable across origins if the keys used are specific to the individual origins using this scheme.¶
9. IANA Considerations
9.1. HTTP Authentication Schemes Registry
IANA has registered the following entry in
the "HTTP Authentication Schemes" registry maintained at
<https://
9.2. TLS Keying Material Exporter Labels
IANA has registered the following entry in
the "TLS Exporter Labels" registry maintained at
<https://
9.3. HTTP Field Name
IANA has registered the following entry in
the "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Field Name Registry" maintained at
<https://
10. References
10.1. Normative References
- [ABNF]
-
Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC5234 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc5234 - [BASE64]
-
Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings", RFC 4648, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC4648 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc4648 - [EdDSA]
-
Josefsson, S. and I. Liusvaara, "Edwards-Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA)", RFC 8032, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC8032 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc8032 - [HTTP]
-
Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "HTTP Semantics", STD 97, RFC 9110, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC9110 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc9110 - [KEY-EXPORT]
-
Rescorla, E., "Keying Material Exporters for Transport Layer Security (TLS)", RFC 5705, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC5705 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc5705 - [PKCS1]
-
Moriarty, K., Ed., Kaliski, B., Jonsson, J., and A. Rusch, "PKCS #1: RSA Cryptography Specifications Version 2.2", RFC 8017, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC8017 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc8017 - [QUIC]
-
Iyengar, J., Ed. and M. Thomson, Ed., "QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed and Secure Transport", RFC 9000, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC9000 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc9000 - [RFC2119]
-
Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC2119 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc2119 - [RFC7627]
-
Bhargavan, K., Ed., Delignat-Lavaud, A., Pironti, A., Langley, A., and M. Ray, "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Session Hash and Extended Master Secret Extension", RFC 7627, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC7627 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc7627 - [RFC8174]
-
Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC8174 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc8174 - [RFC8792]
-
Watsen, K., Auerswald, E., Farrel, A., and Q. Wu, "Handling Long Lines in Content of Internet-Drafts and RFCs", RFC 8792, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC8792 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc8792 - [STRUCTURED
-FIELDS] -
Nottingham, M. and P. Kamp, "Structured Field Values for HTTP", RFC 9651, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC9651 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc9651 - [TLS]
-
Rescorla, E., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3", RFC 8446, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC8446 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc8446 - [URI]
-
Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66, RFC 3986, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC3986 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc3986 - [X.690]
-
ITU-T, "Information technology - ASN.1 encoding Rules: Specification of Basic Encoding Rules (BER), Canonical Encoding Rules (CER) and Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER)", ITU-T Recommendation X690, ISO/IEC 8825-1:2021, , <https://
www >..itu .int /rec /T -REC -X .690
10.2. Informative References
- [ED25519]
-
Josefsson, S. and J. Schaad, "Algorithm Identifiers for Ed25519, Ed448, X25519, and X448 for Use in the Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure", RFC 8410, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC8410 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc8410 - [HOBA]
-
Farrell, S., Hoffman, P., and M. Thomas, "HTTP Origin-Bound Authentication (HOBA)", RFC 7486, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC7486 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc7486 - [HTTP/2]
-
Thomson, M., Ed. and C. Benfield, Ed., "HTTP/2", RFC 9113, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC9113 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc9113 - [HTTP/3]
-
Bishop, M., Ed., "HTTP/3", RFC 9114, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC9114 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc9114 - [MASQUE
-ORIGINAL] -
Schinazi, D., "The MASQUE Protocol", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft
-schinazi , , <https://-masque -00 datatracker >..ietf .org /doc /html /draft -schinazi -masque -00 - [QUIC-TLS]
-
Thomson, M., Ed. and S. Turner, Ed., "Using TLS to Secure QUIC", RFC 9001, DOI 10
.17487 , , <https:///RFC9001 www >..rfc -editor .org /info /rfc9001 - [SEEMS-LEGIT]
-
Jackson, D., Cremers, C., Cohn-Gordon, K., and R. Sasse, "Seems Legit: Automated Analysis of Subtle Attacks on Protocols That Use Signatures", CCS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 2165-2180, DOI 10
.1145 , , <https:///3319535 .3339813 doi >..org /10 .1145 /3319535 .3339813
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank many members of the IETF community, as this document is the fruit of many hallway conversations. In particular, the authors would like to thank David Benjamin, Reese Enghardt, Nick Harper, Dennis Jackson, Ilari Liusvaara, François Michel, Lucas Pardue, Justin Richer, Ben Schwartz, Martin Thomson, and Chris A. Wood for their reviews and contributions. The mechanism described in this document was originally part of the first iteration of MASQUE [MASQUE-ORIGINAL].¶