Category Archives: Web

web stuff

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Mozilla, Network, Web

HTTP Workshop 2015, day -1

http workshopI’ve traveled to a rainy and gray Münster, Germany, today and checked in to my hotel for the coming week and the HTTP Workshop. Tomorrow is the first day and I’m looking forward to it probably a little too much.

There is a whole bunch of attendees coming. Simply put, most of the world’s best brains and the most eager implementers of the HTTP stacks that are in use today and will be in use tomorrow (with a bunch of notable absentees of course but you know you’ll be missed). I’m happy and thrilled to be able to take part during this coming week.

Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

RFC 7540 is HTTP/2

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HTTP/2 is the new protocol for the web, as I trust everyone reading my blog are fully aware of by now. (If you’re not, read http2 explained.)

Today RFC 7540 was published, the final outcome of the years of work put into this by the tireless heroes in the HTTPbis working group of the IETF. Closely related to the main RFC is the one detailing HPACK, which is the header compression algorithm used by HTTP/2 and that is now known as RFC 7541.

The IETF part of this journey started pretty much with Mike Belshe’s posting of draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00 in February 2012. Google’s SPDY effort had been going on for a while and when it was taken to the httpbis working group in IETF, where a few different proposals on how to kick off the HTTP/2 work were debated.

HTTP team working in LondonThe first “httpbis’ified” version of that document (draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-00) was then published on November 28 2012 and the standardization work began for real. HTTP/2 was of course discussed a lot on the mailing list since the start, on the IETF meetings but also in interim meetings around the world.

In Zurich, in January 2014 there was one that I only attended remotely. We had the design team meeting in London immediately after IETF89 (March 2014) in the Mozilla offices just next to Piccadilly Circus (where I took the photos that are shown in this posting). We had our final in-person meetup with the HTTP team at Google’s offices in NYC in June 2014 where we ironed out most of the remaining issues.

In between those two last meetings I published my first version of http2 explained. My attempt at a lengthy and very detailed description of HTTP/2, including describing problems with HTTP/1.1 and motivations for HTTP/2. I’ve since published eleven updates.

HTTP team in London, debating protocol detailsThe last draft update of HTTP/2 that contained actual changes of the binary format was draft-14, published in July 2014. After that, the updates were in the language and clarifications on what to do when. There are some functional changes (added in -16 I believe) for like when which sort of frames are accepted that changes what a state machine should do, but it doesn’t change how the protocol looks on the wire.

RFC 7540 was published on May 15th, 2015

I’ve truly enjoyed having had the chance to be a part of this. There are a bunch of good people who made this happen and while I am most certainly forgetting key persons, some of the peeps that have truly stood out are: Mark, Julian, Roberto, Roy, Will, Tatsuhiro, Patrick, Martin, Mike, Nicolas, Mike, Jeff, Hasan, Herve and Willy.

http2 logo

Mozilla, Network, Web

The state and rate of HTTP/2 adoption

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http2 logoThe protocol HTTP/2 as defined in the draft-17 was approved by the IESG and is being implemented and deployed widely on the Internet today, even before it has turned up as an actual RFC. Back in February, already upwards 5% or maybe even more of the web traffic was using HTTP/2.

My prediction: We’ll see >10% usage by the end of the year, possibly as much as 20-30% a little depending on how fast some of the major and most popular platforms will switch (Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Yahoo and others). In 2016 we might see HTTP/2 serve a majority of all HTTP requests – done by browsers at least.

Counted how? Yeah the second I mention a rate I know you guys will start throwing me hard questions like exactly what do I mean. What is Internet and how would I count this? Let me express it loosely: the share of HTTP requests (by volume of requests, not by bandwidth of data and not just counting browsers). I don’t know how to measure it and we can debate the numbers in December and I guess we can all end up being right depending on what we think is the right way to count!

Who am I to tell? I’m just a person deeply interested in protocols and HTTP/2, so I’ve been involved in the HTTP work group for years and I also work on several HTTP/2 implementations. You can guess as well as I, but this just happens to be my blog!

The HTTP/2 Implementations wiki page currently lists 36 different implementations. Let’s take a closer look at the current situation and prospects in some areas.

Browsers

Firefox and Chome have solid support since a while back. Just use a recent version and you’re good.

Internet Explorer has been shown in a tech preview that spoke HTTP/2 fine. So, run that or wait for it to ship in a public version soon.

There are no news about this from Apple regarding support in Safari. Give up on them and switch over to a browser that keeps up!

Other browsers? Ask them what they do, or replace them with a browser that supports HTTP/2 already.

My estimate: By the end of 2015 the leading browsers with a market share way over 50% combined will support HTTP/2.

Server software

Apache HTTPd is still the most popular web server software on the planet. mod_h2 is a recent module for it that can speak HTTP/2 – still in “alpha” state. Give it time and help out in other ways and it will pay off.

Nginx has told the world they’ll ship HTTP/2 support by the end of 2015.

IIS was showing off HTTP/2 in the Windows 10 tech preview.

H2O is a newcomer on the market with focus on performance and they ship with HTTP/2 support since a while back already.

nghttp2 offers a HTTP/2 => HTTP/1.1 proxy (and lots more) to front your old server with and can then help you deploy HTTP/2 at once.

Apache Traffic Server supports HTTP/2 fine. Will show up in a release soon.

Also, netty, jetty and others are already on board.

HTTPS initiatives like Let’s Encrypt, helps to make it even easier to deploy and run HTTPS on your own sites which will smooth the way for HTTP/2 deployments on smaller sites as well. Getting sites onto the TLS train will remain a hurdle and will be perhaps the single biggest obstacle to get even more adoption.

My estimate: By the end of 2015 the leading HTTP server products with a market share of more than 80% of the server market will support HTTP/2.

Proxies

Squid works on HTTP/2 support.

HAproxy? I haven’t gotten a straight answer from that team, but Willy Tarreau has been actively participating in the HTTP/2 work all the time so I expect them to have work in progress.

While very critical to the protocol, PHK of the Varnish project has said that Varnish will support it if it gets traction.

My estimate: By the end of 2015, the leading proxy software projects will start to have or are already shipping HTTP/2 support.

Services

Google (including Youtube and other sites in the Google family) and Twitter have ran HTTP/2 enabled for months already.

Lots of existing services offer SPDY today and I would imagine most of them are considering and pondering on how to switch to HTTP/2 as Chrome has already announced them going to drop SPDY during 2016 and Firefox will also abandon SPDY at some point.

My estimate: By the end of 2015 lots of the top sites of the world will be serving HTTP/2 or will be working on doing it.

Content Delivery Networks

Akamai plans to ship HTTP/2 by the end of the year. Cloudflare have stated that they “will support HTTP/2 once NGINX with it becomes available“.

Amazon has not given any response publicly that I can find for when they will support HTTP/2 on their services.

Not a totally bright situation but I also believe (or hope) that as soon as one or two of the bigger CDN players start to offer HTTP/2 the others might feel a bigger pressure to follow suit.

Non-browser clients

curl and libcurl support HTTP/2 since months back, and the HTTP/2 implementations page lists available implementations for just about all major languages now. Like node-http2 for javascript, http2-perl, http2 for Go, Hyper for Python, OkHttp for Java, http-2 for Ruby and more. If you do HTTP today, you should be able to switch over to HTTP/2 relatively easy.

More?

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few obvious points but I might update this as we go as soon as my dear readers point out my faults and mistakes!

How long is HTTP/1.1 going to be around?

My estimate: HTTP 1.1 will be around for many years to come. There is going to be a double-digit percentage share of the existing sites on the Internet (and who knows how many that aren’t even accessible from the Internet) for the foreseeable future. For technical reasons, for philosophical reasons and for good old we’ll-never-touch-it-again reasons.

The survey

Finally, I asked friends on twitter, G+ and Facebook what they think the HTTP/2 share would be by the end of 2015 with the help of a little poll. This does of course not make it into any sound or statistically safe number but is still just a collection of what a set of random people guessed. A quick poll to get a rough feel. This is how the 64 responses I received were distributed:

http2 share at end of 2015

Evidently, if you take a median out of these results you can see that the middle point is between 5-10 and 10-15. I’ll make it easy and say that the poll showed a group estimate on 10%. Ten percent of the total HTTP traffic to be HTTP/2 at the end of 2015.

I didn’t vote here but I would’ve checked the 15-20 choice, thus a fair bit over the median but only slightly into the top quarter..

In plain numbers this was the distribution of the guesses:

0-5% 29.1% (19)
5-10% 21.8% (13)
10-15% 14.5% (10)
15-20% 10.9% (7)
20-25% 9.1% (6)
25-30% 3.6% (2)
30-40% 3.6% (3)
40-50% 3.6% (2)
more than 50% 3.6% (2)

Firefox, Mozilla, Network, Security, Web

TLS in HTTP/2

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SSL padlockI’ve written the http2 explained document and I’ve done several talks about HTTP/2. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about TLS in association with HTTP/2 due to this, and I want to address some of them here.

TLS is not mandatory

In the HTTP/2 specification that has been approved and that is about to become an official RFC any day now, there is no language that mandates the use of TLS for securing the protocol. On the contrary, the spec clearly explains how to use it both in clear text (over plain TCP) as well as over TLS. TLS is not mandatory for HTTP/2.

TLS mandatory in effect

While the spec doesn’t force anyone to implement HTTP/2 over TLS but allows you to do it over clear text TCP, representatives from both the Firefox and the Chrome development teams have expressed their intents to only implement HTTP/2 over TLS. This means HTTPS:// URLs are the only ones that will enable HTTP/2 for these browsers. Internet Explorer people have expressed that they intend to also support the new protocol without TLS, but when they shipped their first test version as part of the Windows 10 tech preview, that browser also only supported HTTP/2 over TLS. As of this writing, there has been no browser released to the public that speaks clear text HTTP/2. Most existing servers only speak HTTP/2 over TLS.

The difference between what the spec allows and what browsers will provide is the key here, and browsers and all other user-agents are all allowed and expected to each select their own chosen path forward.

If you’re implementing and deploying a server for HTTP/2, you pretty much have to do it for HTTPS to get users. And your clear text implementation will not be as tested…

A valid remark would be that browsers are not the only HTTP/2 user-agents and there are several such non-browser implementations that implement the non-TLS version of the protocol, but I still believe that the browsers’ impact on this will be notable.

Stricter TLS

When opting to speak HTTP/2 over TLS, the spec mandates stricter TLS requirements than what most clients ever have enforced for normal HTTP 1.1 over TLS.

It says TLS 1.2 or later is a MUST. It forbids compression and renegotiation. It specifies fairly detailed “worst acceptable” key sizes and cipher suites. HTTP/2 will simply use safer TLS.

Another detail here is that HTTP/2 over TLS requires the use of ALPN which is a relatively new TLS extension, RFC 7301, which helps us negotiate the new HTTP version without losing valuable time or network packet round-trips.

TLS-only encourages more HTTPS

Since browsers only speak HTTP/2 over TLS (so far at least), sites that want HTTP/2 enabled must do it over HTTPS to get users. It provides a gentle pressure on sites to offer proper HTTPS. It pushes more people over to end-to-end TLS encrypted connections.

This (more HTTPS) is generally considered a good thing by me and us who are concerned about users and users’ right to privacy and right to avoid mass surveillance.

Why not mandatory TLS?

The fact that it didn’t get in the spec as mandatory was because quite simply there was never a consensus that it was a good idea for the protocol. A large enough part of the working group’s participants spoke up against the notion of mandatory TLS for HTTP/2. TLS was not mandatory before so the starting point was without mandatory TLS and we didn’t manage to get to another stand-point.

When I mention this in discussions with people the immediate follow-up question is…

No really, why not mandatory TLS?

The motivations why anyone would be against TLS for HTTP/2 are plentiful. Let me address the ones I hear most commonly, in an order that I think shows the importance of the arguments from those who argued them.

1. A desire to inspect HTTP traffic

looking-glassThere is a claimed “need” to inspect or intercept HTTP traffic for various reasons. Prisons, schools, anti-virus, IPR-protection, local law requirements, whatever are mentioned. The absolute requirement to cache things in a proxy is also often bundled with this, saying that you can never build a decent network on an airplane or with a satellite link etc without caching that has to be done with intercepts.

Of course, MITMing proxies that terminate SSL traffic are not even rare these days and HTTP/2 can’t do much about limiting the use of such mechanisms.

2. Think of the little ones

small-big-dog“Small devices cannot handle the extra TLS burden“. Either because of the extra CPU load that comes with TLS or because of the cert management in a billion printers/fridges/routers etc. Certificates also expire regularly and need to be updated in the field.

Of course there will be a least acceptable system performance required to do TLS decently and there will always be systems that fall below that threshold.

3. Certificates are too expensive

The price of certificates for servers are historically often brought up as an argument against TLS even it isn’t really HTTP/2 related and I don’t think it was ever an argument that was particularly strong against TLS within HTTP/2. Several CAs now offer zero-cost or very close to zero-cost certificates these days and with the upcoming efforts like letsencrypt.com, chances are it’ll become even better in the not so distant future.

pile-of-moneyRecently someone even claimed that HTTPS limits the freedom of users since you need to give personal information away (he said) in order to get a certificate for your server. This was not a price he was willing to pay apparently. This is however simply not true for the simplest kinds of certificates. For Domain Validated (DV) certificates you usually only have to prove that you “control” the domain in question in some way. Usually by being able to receive email to a specific receiver within the domain.

4. The CA system is broken

TLS of today requires a PKI system where there are trusted certificate authorities that sign certificates and this leads to a situation where all modern browsers trust several hundred CAs to do this right. I don’t think a lot of people are happy with this and believe this is the ultimate security solution. There’s a portion of the Internet that advocates for DANE (DNSSEC) to address parts of the problem, while others work on gradual band-aids like Certificate Transparency and OCSP stapling to make it suck less.

please trust me

My personal belief is that rejecting TLS on the grounds that it isn’t good enough or not perfect is a weak argument. TLS and HTTPS are the best way we currently have to secure web sites. I wouldn’t mind seeing it improved in all sorts of ways but I don’t believe running protocols clear text until we have designed and deployed the next generation secure protocol is a good idea – and I think it will take a long time (if ever) until we see a TLS replacement.

Who were against mandatory TLS?

Yeah, lots of people ask me this, but I will refrain from naming specific people or companies here since I have no plans on getting into debates with them about details and subtleties in the way I portrait their arguments. You can find them yourself if you just want to and you can most certainly make educated guesses without even doing so.

What about opportunistic security?

A text about TLS in HTTP/2 can’t be complete without mentioning this part. A lot of work in the IETF these days are going on around introducing and making sure opportunistic security is used for protocols. It was also included in the HTTP/2 draft for a while but was moved out from the core spec in the name of simplification and because it could be done anyway without being part of the spec. Also, far from everyone believes opportunistic security is a good idea. The opponents tend to say that it will hinder the adoption of “real” HTTPS for sites. I don’t believe that, but I respect that opinion because it is a guess as to how users will act just as well as my guess is they won’t act like that!

Opportunistic security for HTTP is now being pursued outside of the HTTP/2 spec and allows clients to upgrade plain TCP connections to instead do “unauthenticated TLS” connections. And yes, it should always be emphasized: with opportunistic security, there should never be a “padlock” symbol or anything that would suggest that the connection is “secure”.

Firefox supports opportunistic security for HTTP and it will be enabled by default from Firefox 37.

Translations

Пост доступен на сайте softdroid.net: Восстановление: TLS в HTTP/2. (Russian)

TLS in HTTP/2 (Kazakh)

Network, Open Source, Web

curl, smiley-URLs and libc

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Some interesting Unicode URLs have recently been seen used in the wild – like in this billboard ad campaign from Coca Cola, and a friend of mine asked me about curl in reference to these and how it deals with such URLs.

emojicoke-by-stevecoleuk-450

(Picture by stevencoleuk)

I ran some tests and decided to blog my observations since they are a bit curious. The exact URL I tried was ‘www.O.ws’ (not the same smiley as shown on this billboard – note that I’ve replace the actual smiley with “O” in this entire post since wordpress craps on it) – it is really hard to enter by hand so now is the time to appreciate your ability to cut and paste! It appears they registered several domains for a set of different smileys.

These smileys are not really allowed IDN (where IDN means International Domain Names) symbols which make these domains a bit different. They should not (see below for details) be converted to punycode before getting resolved but instead I assume that the pure UTF-8 sequence should or at least will be fed into the name resolver function. Well, either way it should either pass in punycode or the UTF-8 string.

If curl was built to use libidn, it still won’t convert this to punycode and the verbose output says “Failed to convert www.O.ws to ACE; String preparation failed”

curl (exact version doesn’t matter) using the stock threaded resolver

  • Debian Linux (glibc 2.19) – FAIL
  • Windows 7 – FAIL
  • Mac OS X 10.9 – SUCCESS

But then also perhaps to no surprise, the exact same results are shown if I try to ping those host names on these systems. It works on the mac, it fails on Linux and Windows. Wget 1.16 also fails on my Debian systems (just as a reference and I didn’t try it on any of the other platforms).

My curl build on Linux that uses c-ares for name resolving instead of glibc succeeds perfectly. host, nslookup and dig all work fine with it on Linux too (as well as nslookup on Windows):

$ host www.O.ws
www.O.ws has address 64.70.19.202
$ ping www.O.ws
ping: unknown host www.O.ws

While the same command sequence on the mac shows:

$ host www.O.ws
www.O.ws has address 64.70.19.202
$ ping www.O.ws
PING www.O.ws (64.70.19.202): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.70.19.202: icmp_seq=0 ttl=44 time=191.689 ms
64 bytes from 64.70.19.202: icmp_seq=1 ttl=44 time=191.124 ms

Slightly interesting additional tidbit: if I rebuild curl to use gethostbyname_r() instead of getaddrinfo() it works just like on the mac, so clearly this is glibc having an opinion on how this should work when given this UTF-8 hostname.

Pasting in the URL into Firefox and Chrome works just fine. They both convert the name to punycode and use “www.xn--h28h.ws” which then resolves to the same IPv4 address.

Update: as was pointed out in a comment below, the “64.70.19.202” IP address is not the correct IP for the site. It is just the registrar’s landing page so it sends back that response to any host or domain name in the .ws domain that doesn’t exist!

What do the IDN specs say?

The U-263A smileyThis is not my area of expertise. I had to consult Patrik Fältström here to get this straightened out (but please if I got something wrong here the mistake is still all mine). Apparently this smiley is allowed in RFC 3940 (IDNA2003), but that has been replaced by RFC 5890-5892 (IDNA2008) where this is DISALLOWED. If you read the spec, this is 263A.

So, depending on which spec you follow it was a valid IDN character or it isn’t anymore.

What does the libc docs say?

The POSIX docs for getaddrinfo doesn’t contain enough info to tell who’s right but it doesn’t forbid UTF-8 encoded strings. The regular glibc docs for getaddrinfo also doesn’t say anything and interestingly, the Apple Mac OS X version of the docs says just as little.

With this complete lack of guidance, it is hardly any additional surprise that the glibc gethostbyname docs also doesn’t mention what it does in this case but clearly it doesn’t do the same as getaddrinfo in the glibc case at least.

What’s on the actual site?

A redirect to www.emoticoke.com which shows a rather boring page.

emoticoke

Who’s right?

I don’t know. What do you think?

Mozilla, Network, Web

HTTP/2 is at 5%

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http2 logoHere follow some numbers extracted from my recent HTTP/2 presentation.

First: HTTP/2 is not finalized yet and it is not yet in RFC status, even though things are progressing nicely within the IETF. With some luck we reach RFC status within Q1 this year.

On January 13th 2015, Firefox 35 was released with HTTP/2 enabled by default. Firefox was already running it enabled before that in beta and development versions.

Chrome has also been sporting HTTP/2 support in development versions since many moths back where it could easily be manually enabled. Chrome 40 was the first main release shipped with HTTP/2 enabled by default, but it has so far only been enabled for a very small fraction of the user-base.

On January 28th 2015, Google reported to me by email that they saw HTTP/2 being used in 5% of their global traffic (que all relevant disclaimers that this is not statistically safe numbers). This, close after a shaky period with Google having had their HTTP/2 services disabled through parts of the Christmas holidays (due to bugs) – and as explained above, there’s been no time for any mainstream browser to use HTTP/2 by default for very long!

Further data points: Mozilla collects telemetry data from Firefox users who opted-in to it, and it collects numbers on “HTTP Protocol Version Used on Response”. On February 10, it reports that Firefox 35 users have got their responses to report HTTP/2 in 9% of all responses (out of more than 340 billion reported responses). The Telemetry for Firefox Nightly 38 even reports HTTP/2 in 14% of all responses (based on a much smaller sample collection), which I guess could very well be because users on such a bleeding edge version are more experimental by nature.

In these Firefox stats we see that recently, the number of HTTP/2 responses outnumber the HTTP/1.0 responses 9 to 1.

Network, Web

http2 explained 1.8

I’ve been updating my “http2 explained” document every nohttp2 logow and then since my original release of it back in April 2014. Today I put up version 1.8 which is one of the bigger updates in a while:

http2 explained

The HTTP/2 Last Call within the IETF ended yesterday and the wire format of the protocol has remained fixed for quite some time now so it seemed like a good moment.

I updated some graphs and images to make them look better and be more personal, I added some new short sections in 8.4 and I refreshed the language in several places. Also, now all links mentioned in footnotes and elsewhere should be properly clickable to make following them a more pleasant experience. And page numbers!

As always, do let me know if you find errors, have questions on the content or think I should add something!

Firefox, Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

Changing networks on Mac with Firefox

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Not too long ago I blogged about my work to better deal with changing networks while Firefox is running. That job was basically two parts.

A) generic code to handle receiving such a network-changed event and then

B) a platform specific part that was for Windows that detected such a network change and sent the event

Today I’ve landed yet another fix for part B called bug 1079385, which detects network changes for Firefox on Mac OS X.

mac miniI’ve never programmed anything before on the Mac so this was sort of my christening in this environment. I mean, I’ve written countless of POSIX compliant programs including curl and friends that certainly builds and runs on Mac OS just fine, but I never before used the Mac-specific APIs to do things.

I got a mac mini just two weeks ago to work on this. Getting it up, prepared and my first Firefox built from source took all-in-all less than three hours. Learning the details of the mac API world was much more trouble and can’t say that I’m mastering it now either but I did find myself at least figuring out how to detect when IP addresses on the interfaces change and a changed address is a pretty good signal that the network changed somehow.