Tag Archives: HTTP2

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Network, Web

Http2 interim meeting NYC

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On June 5th, around thirty people sat down around a huge table in a conference room on the 4th floor in the Google offices in New York City, with a heavy rain pouring down outside.

It was time for another IETF http2 interim meeting. The attendees were all participants in the HTTPbis work group and came from a wide variety of companies and countries. The major browser vendors were represented there, and so were operators and big service providers and some proxy people. Most of the people who have been speaking up on the mailing list over the last year or so, unfortunately with a couple of people notably absent. (And before anyone asks, yes we are a group where the majority is old males like me.)

Most people present knew many of the others already, which helped to create a friendly familiar spirit and we quickly got started on the Thursday morning working our way through the rather long lits of issues to deal with. When we had our previous interim meeting in London, I think most of us though we would’ve been further along today but recent development and discussions on the list had actually brought back a lot of issues we though we were already done with and we now reiterated a whole slew of subjects. We weren’t allowed to take photographs indoors so you won’t see any pictures of this opportunity from me here.

Google offices building logo

We did close many issues and I’ll just quickly mention some of the noteworthy ones here…

Extensions

We started out with the topic of “extensions”. Should we revert the decision from Zurich (where it was decided that we shouldn’t allow extensions in http2) or was the current state of the protocol the right one? The arguments for allowing extensions included that we’d keep getting requests for new things to add unless we have a way and that some of the recent stuff we’ve added really could’ve been done as extensions instead. An argument against it is that it makes things much simpler and reliable if we just document exactly what the protocol has and is, and removing “optional” behavior from the protocol has been one of the primary mantas along the design process.

The discussion went back and forth for a long time, and after almost three hours we had kind of a draw. Nobody was firmly against “the other” alternative but the two sides also seemed to have roughly the same amount of support. Then it was yet again time for the coin toss to guide us. Martin brought out an Australian coin and … the next protocol draft will allow extensions. Again. This also forces implementation to have to read and skip all unknown frames it receives compared to the existing situation where no unknown frames can ever occur.

BLOCKED as an extension

A rather given first candidate for an extension was the BLOCKED frame. At the time BLOCKED was added to the protocol it was explicitly added into the spec because we didn’t have extensions – and it is now being lifted out into one.

ALTSVC as an extension

What received slightly more resistance was the move to move out the ALTSVC frame as well. It was argued that the frame isn’t mandatory to support and therefore easily can be made into an extension.

Simplified padding

Another small change of the wire format since draft-12 was the removal of the high byte for padding to simplify. It reduces the amount you can pad a single frame but you can easily pad more using other means if you really have to, and there were numbers presented that said that 255 bytes were enough with HTTP 1.1 already so probably it will be enough for version 2 as well.

Schedule

There will be a new draft out really soon: draft -13. Martin, our editor of the spec, says he’ll be able to ship it in a week. That is intended to be the last draft, intended for implementation and it will then be expected to get deployed rather widely to allow us all in the industry to see how it works and be able to polish details or wordings that may still need it.

We had numerous vendors and HTTP stack implementers in the room and when we discussed schedule for when various products will be able to see daylight. If we all manage to stick to the plans. we may just have plenty of products and services that support http2 by the September/October time frame. If nothing major is found in this latest draft, we’re looking at RFC status not too far into 2015.

Meeting summary

I think we’re closing in for real now and I have good hopes for the protocol and our progress to a really wide scale deployment across the Internet. The HTTPbis group is an awesome crowd to work with and I had a great time. Our hosts took good care of us and made sure we didn’t lack any services or supplies. Extra thanks go to those of you who bought me dinners and to those who took me out to good beer places!

My http2 document

Yeah, it will now become somewhat out of date and my plan is to update it once the next draft ships. I’ll also do another http2 presentation already this week so I hope to also post an updated slide set soonish. Stay tuned!

Wireshark

My plan is to cooperate with the other Wireshark hackers and help making sure we have the next draft version supported in Wireshark really soon after its published.

curl and nghttp2

Most of the differences introduced are in the binary format so nghttp2 will need to be updated again – it is the library curl uses for the wire format of http2. The curl parts will need some adjustments, for example for Content-Encoding gzip that no longer is implicit but there should be little to do in the curl code for this draft bump.

Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

licensed to get shared

As my http2 presentation is about to get its 16,000th viewer over at Slideshare I just have to take a moment and reflect over that fact.

Sixteen thousand viewers. I’ve uploaded slides there before over the years but no other presentation has gotten even close to this amount of attention even though some of them have been collecting views for years by now.

http2 presentation screenshot

I wrote my http2 explained document largely due to the popularity of my presentation and the stream of questions and curiosity that brought to life. Within just a couple of days, that 27 page document had been downloaded more than 2,000 times and by now over 5000 times. This is almost 7MB of PDF which I believe raises the bar for the ordinary casual browser to not download it without having an interest and intention to at least glance through it. Of course I realize a large portion of said downloads are never really read.

Someone suggested to me (possibly in jest) that I should convert these into ebooks and “charge 1 USD a piece to get some profit out of them”. I really won’t and I would have a struggle to do that. It has been said before but in my case it is indeed true: I stand on the shoulders of giants. I’ve just collected information and written down texts that mostly are ideas, suggestions and conclusions others have already made in various other forums, lists or documents. I wouldn’t feel right charging for that nor depriving anyone the rights and freedoms to create derivatives and continue building on what I’ve done. I’m just the curator and janitor here. Besides, I already have an awesome job at an awesome company that allows me to work full time on open source – every day.

The next phase started thanks to the open license. A friendly volunteer named Vladimir Lettiev showed up and translated the entire document into Russian and now suddenly the reach of the text is vastly expanded into a territory where it previously just couldn’t penetrate. With using people’s native languages, information can really trickle down to a much larger audience. Especially in regions that aren’t very Englishified.

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Security

#MeraKrypto

A whole range of significant Swedish network organizations (ISOC, SNUS, DFRI and SUNET) organized a full-day event today, managed by the great mr Olle E Johansson. The event, called “MeraKrypto” (MoreCrypto would be the exact translation), was a day with introductions to TLS and a lot of talks around TLS and other encryption and security related topics.

I was there and held a talk on the topic of “curl and TLS” and I basically talked some basics around what curl and libcurl are, how we do TLS, some common problems and hwo verifying the server cert is a common usage mistake and then I continued on to quickly mention how http2 and TLS relate..See my slides below, but please be aware that as usual you may not grasp the whole thing only by the (English) slides. The event was fully booked so there was around one hundred peeps in the audience and there were a lot of interested minds that asked good questions proving they really understood the topics.

The discussion almost got heated during the talk about how companies do MITMing of SSL sessions and this guy from Bluecoat pretty much single-handedly argued for the need for this and how “it fills a useful purpose”.

It was a great afternoon!

The event was streamed live and recorded on video. I’ll post a link as soon as it gets available to me.

Network, Web

http2 explained

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http2 front page

I’m hereby offering you all the first version of my document explaining http2, the protocol. It features explanations on the background, basic fundamentals, details on the wire format and something about existing implementations and what’s to expect for the future.

The full PDF currently boasts 27 pages at version 1.0, but I plan to keep up with the http2 development going further and I’m also kind of thinking that I will get at least some user feedback, and I’ll do subsequent updates to improve and extend the document over time. Of course time will tell how good that will work.

The document is edited in libreoffice and that file is available on github, but ODT is really not a format suitable for patches and merges so I hope we can sort out changes with filing issues and sending emails.

Open Source

Wireshark dissector work

WiresharkRecently I cloned the Wireshark git repository and started updating the http2 dissector. That’s the piece of code that gets called to analyze a stream of data that Wireshark thinks is http2.

The current http2 dissector was left at draft-09 state, while the current draft at the time was number 11 and there have been several changes on the binary format since so any reasonably updated client or server would send or receive byte streams that Wireshark couldn’t properly display.

I never wrote any dissector code before but I must say Wireshark didn’t disappoint. It was straight forward and mostly downright easy to fix most of the wrong details. I’m not pretending to be a master at this nor is the dissector code anywhere near “finished” yet but I still enjoyed the API and how to write a thing like this.

I’ve since dissected plain-text http2 streams that I’ve done with curl+nghttp2 and I’ve also used the SSLKEYLOGFILE trick with Firefox to automatically decrypt the TLS session and have the dissector figure out the underlying http2 parts.

If there’s any little snag to mention, it is the fact that they insist on getting patches submitted directly to gerrit instead of any mailing list or similar. This required me to create a gerrit account, and really figure out how to push my stuff from git to there, instead of the more traditional and simpler approach of just sending my patch to a mailing list or possibly submitting it to a bug/patch tracker somewhere with my browser.

Call me old-style but in fact the hip way of today with a pull-request github style would also have been much easier. Here’s what my gerrit submission looks like. But I get it, gerrit does push a little more work over to the submitter and I figure that once a submitter such as myself finally has fixed all the nits in the patch it is very easy for the project to actually merge it. I actually got someone else to help me point out how to even find the link to view the code review after the first one was submitted on the site… (when I post this, my patch has not yet been accepted or merged into the wireshark git repo)

Here’s a basic screenshot showing a trace of Firefox requesting https://nghttp2.org using http2. Click it for the full thing.

wireshark-screenshot

.. and what happens this morning my time? There’s a brand new http2 draft-12 out with more changes on the on-the-wire format! Well to be honest, that really wasn’t a surprise. I’ll get the new stuff supported too, but I’ll do that in a separate patch as I prefer to hold off until I see a live stream by at least one implementation to test against.

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source, Web

http2 in curl

While the first traces of http2 support in curl was added already back in September 2013 it hasn’t been until recently it actually was made useful. There’s been a lot of http2 related activities in the curl team recently and in the late January 2014 we could run our first command line inter-op tests against public http2 (draft-09) servers on the Internet.

There’s a lot to be said about http2 for those not into its nitty gritty details, but I’ll focus on the curl side of this universe in this blog post. I’ll do separate posts and presentations on http2 “internals” later.

A quick http2 overview

http2 (without the minor version, as per what the IETF work group has decided on) is a binary protocol that allows many logical streams multiplexed over the same physical TCP connection, it features compressed headers in both directions and it has stream priorities and more. It is being designed to maintain the user concepts and paradigms from HTTP 1.1 so web sites don’t have to change contents and web authors won’t need to relearn a lot. The web will not break because of http2, it will just magically work a little better, a little smoother and a little faster.

In libcurl we build http2 support with the help of the excellent library called nghttp2, which takes care of all the binary protocol details for us. You’ll also have to build it with a new enough version of the SSL library of your choice, as http2 over TLS will require use of some fairly recent TLS extensions that not many older releases have and several TLS libraries still completely lack!

The need for an extension is because with speaking TLS over port 443 which HTTPS implies, the current and former web infrastructure assumes that we will speak HTTP 1.1 over that, while we now want to be able to instead say we want to talk http2. When Google introduced SPDY then pushed for a new extension called NPN to do this, which when taken through the standardization in IETF has been forked, changed and renamed to ALPN with roughly the same characteristics (I don’t know the specific internals so I’ll stick to how they appear from the outside).

So, NPN and especially ALPN are fairly recent TLS extensions so you need a modern enough SSL library to get that support. OpenSSL and NSS both support NPN and ALPN with a recent enough version, while GnuTLS only supports ALPN. You can build libcurl to use any of these threes libraries to get it to talk http2 over TLS.

http2 using libcurl

(This still describes what’s in curl’s git repository, the first release to have this level of http2 support is the upcoming 7.36.0 release.)

Users of libcurl who want to enable http2 support will only have to set CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION to CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0 and that’s it. It will make libcurl try to use http2 for the HTTP requests you do with that handle.

For HTTP URLs, this will make libcurl send a normal HTTP 1.1 request with an offer to the server to upgrade the connection to version 2 instead. If it does, libcurl will continue using http2 in the clear on the connection and if it doesn’t, it’ll continue using HTTP 1.1 on it. This mode is what Firefox and Chrome will not support.

For HTTPS URLs, libcurl will use NPN and ALPN as explained above and offer to speak http2 and if the server supports it. there will be http2 sweetness from than point onwards. Or it selects HTTP 1.1 and then that’s what will be used. The latter is also what will be picked if the server doesn’t support ALPN and NPN.

Alt-Svc and ALTSVC are new things planned to show up in time for http2 draft-11 so we haven’t really thought through how to best support them and provide their features in the libcurl API. Suggestions (and patches!) are of course welcome!

http2 with curl

Hardly surprising, the curl command line tool also has this power. You use the –http2 command line option to switch on the libcurl behavior as described above.

Translated into old-style

To reduce transition pains and problems and to work with the rest of the world to the highest possible degree, libcurl will (decompress and) translate received http2 headers into http 1.1 style headers so that applications and users will get a stream of headers that look very much the way you’re used to and it will produce an initial response line that says HTTP 2.0 blabla.

Building (lib)curl to support http2

See the README.http2 file in the lib/ directory.

This is still a draft version of http2!

I just want to make this perfectly clear: http2 is not out “for real” yet. We have tried our http2 support somewhat at the draft-09 level and Tatsuhiro has worked on the draft-10 support in nghttp2. I expect there to be at least one more draft, but perhaps even more, before http2 becomes an official RFC. We hope to be able to stay on the frontier of http2 and deliver support for the most recent draft going forward.

PS. If you try any of this and experience any sort of problems, please speak to us on the curl-library mailing list and help us smoothen out whatever problem you got!

cURL

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Network

HTTPbis design team meeting London

I’m writing this just hours after the HTTPbis design team meeting in London 2014 has ended.

Around 30 people attended the meeting i Mozilla’s central London office. The fridge was filled up with drinks, the shelves were full of snacks and goodies. The day could begin. This is the Saturday after the IETF89 week so most people attending had already spent the whole or parts of the week before here in London doing other HTTP and network related work. The HTTPbis sessions at the IETF itself were productive and had already pushed us forward.

We started at 9:30 and we quickly got to work. Mark Nottingham guided us through the day with usual efficiency.

We all basically hang out in a huge room, some in chairs, some in sofas and a bunch of people on the floor or just standing up. We had mikes passed around and the http2 discussions were flowing back and forth depending on the topics and what people felt about them. Some of the issues that were nailed down this time and will end up detailed in the upcoming draft-11 are (strictly speaking, we only discussed the things and formed opinions, as by IETF guidelines we can’t decide things on an offline meeting like this):

  • Priorities of streams will have a dependency graph or direction, making individual  streams less or more important than other
  • A client can send headers without compression and tell the proxy that the header shouldn’t be compressed – used a way to mitigate some of the compression security problems
  • There will be no TLS renegotiation allowed mid-session. Basically a client will have to tear down the connection and negotiate again if suddenly a need to use a client certificate arises.
  • Alt-Svc is the way forward so ALTSVC will appear a new frame in draft-11. This is the way to signal to an application that there is another “route” tIMG_20140308_100453o the same content on the same server. This will allow for what is popularly known as “opportunistic encryption” or at least one sort of that. In short, you can do “plain-text” HTTP over a TLS connection using this…
  • We decided that a server should support gzip contents from clients

There were some other things too handled, but I believe those are the main changes. When the afternoon started to turn long, beers and other beverages were brought out and we did enjoy a relaxing social finale of the day before we split up in smaller groups and headed out in the busy London night to get dinner…

Thanks everyone for a great day. I also appreciated meeting several people in real-life I never met before, only discussed with and read emails from online and of course some old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time!

Oh, there’s also a new rough time frame for http2 going forward. Nearest in time would be the draft-11 at the end of March and another interim in the beginning of June (Boston?).

As a reminder, here’s what was happened for draft-10, and here is http2 draft-10.

Out of all people present today, I believe Mozilla was the company with the largest team (8 attendees) – funnily enough none of us Mozillians there actually work in this office or even in this country.

Network, Web

HTTP2 – the next step

IETFThe HTTPbis working group of the IETF had an interim meeting in Zurich January 22nd to 24th. I participated from remote and I listened in on the discussions over webex and followed the jabber room while the meetings were going on, addressing HTTP2 protocol issues one by one ironing out quirks and progressing forward.

I won’t bore you with details why I wasn’t present in Zurich.

Here’s a couple of quick and brief reflections from my perspective:

Listening in from remote like this is not at all adequately compensating for not being there. A room full of people discussing something is really hard to follow from remote and completely impossible to interact with. It is better than not being able to listen in at all, but it is certainly not a replacement for being there.

It is amazing how much faster people can come to conclusions and fix issues when being in the same room. Issues that have been lingering in the tracker for a very long time could be dealt with and closed within minutes. Things like what to call the protocol in ALPN or to remove the ability to switched off flow control. Not all issues of course…

HTTP2 draft-09 that soon will become draft-10 to reflect the updates from this meeting and more, is from my perspective quite far in its process. It is clearly at a point that seems to be OK with most people and the discussions are now just about details. Of course the devil is in the details and I’m not saying it can’t take a long time to settle on them, but the structure and main concepts of the protocol are probably now established.

There were not very many proxy or server people at the interim. Most of the people seemed to be client-side oriented and some service oriented. I’m personally client-side biased myself but I hope this doesn’t lead to us deciding on things that the “other side” will have problems with down the line.

Firefox nightly supports HTTP2 draft-09 (for https:// URLs) and twitter supports it server side. Enable it in the browser by entering “about:config” in the URL bar and change the config entry called “network.http.spdy.enabled.http2draft” to true. Done.

Some of the biggest HTTP2 changes brought up compared to what draft-09 says include:

  • no more ability to switch off flow control
  • the prioritization field/concept “weighted dependency tree approach”
  • >= TLS 1.2 with ephemeral ciphers
  • MUST not use TLS compression
  • tolerant to TLS false start or at least must accept/buffer application layer data
  • padding

There was also a whole lot of discussions about TLS for http:// urls, proxys, MITM for SSL, opportunistic encryption and more but I believe most of those issues remained at the same position as before – I missed out on parts of the last afternoon so I may have missed some details. It’ll all be revealed in draft-10 and the mailing list I’m sure!

Update: the minutes from the interim meeting.

http2-drawing

cURL and libcurl, Haxx, Network, Open Source, Web

I go Mozilla

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Mozilla dinosaur head logo

In January 2014, I start working for Mozilla

I’ve worked in open source projects for some 20 years and I’ve maintained curl and libcurl for over 15 years. I’m an internet protocol geek at heart and Mozilla seems like a perfect place for me to continue to explore this interest of mine and combine it with real open source in its purest form.

I plan to use my experiences from all my years of protocol fiddling and making stuff work on different platforms against random server implementations into the networking team at Mozilla and work on improving Firefox and more.

I’m putting my current embedded Linux focus to the side and I plunge into a worldwide known company with worldwide known brands to do open source within the internet protocols I enjoy so much. I’ll be working out of my home, just outside Stockholm Sweden. Mozilla has no office in my country and I have no immediate plans of moving anywhere (with a family, kids and all established here).

I intend to bring my mindset on protocols and how to do things well into the Mozilla networking stack and world and I hope and expect that I will get inspiration and input from Mozilla and take that back and further improve curl over time. My agreement with Mozilla also gives me a perfect opportunity to increase my commitment to curl and curl development. I want to maintain and possibly increase my involvement in IETF and the httpbis work with http2 and related stuff. With one foot in Firefox and one in curl going forward, I think I may have a somewhat unique position and attitude toward especially HTTP.

I’ve not yet met another Swedish Mozillian but I know I’m not the only one located in Sweden. I guess I now have a reason to look them up and say hello when suitable.

Björn and Linus will continue to drive and run Haxx with me taking a step back into the shadows (Haxx-wise). I’ll still be part of the collective Haxx just as I was for many years before I started working full-time for Haxx in 2009. My email address, my sites etc will remain on haxx.se.

I’m looking forward to 2014!