Network Working Group C. LaJoie, Ed. Internet-Draft Itumi, LLC Intended status: Experimental June 30, 2010 Expires: January 1, 2011 Metadata Query Protocol draft-lajoie-md-query-00 Abstract This document defines a simple protocol for retrieving metadata about entities. The goal of the protocol is to profile various aspects of HTTP to allow requesters to rely on certain, rigorously defined, behaviour. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. 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LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.1. Notation and Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Protocol Transport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1. HTTP Version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2. HTTP Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.3. Request Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.4. Response Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.5. Status Codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.6. Base URL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.7. Content Negotiation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3. Metadata Query Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.1. Identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.1.1. Transforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.2. Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.2.1. Request . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.2.2. Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.2.3. Example Request and Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4. Efficient Retrieval and Caching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4.1. Conditional Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4.2. Content Caching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4.3. Content Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 5.1. Integrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 5.2. Confidentiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 5.3. Authentication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 6. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Appendix A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 1. Introduction Many clients of web-based services are capable of consuming descriptive metadata about a service in order to customize or information the client's connection parameters. While the form of the metadata (e.g.. JSON, XML) and content varies between services this document attempts to specifies a set of semantics for HTTP [RFC2616] that allow clients to rely on certain behavior. The defined behavior is meant to make it easy for clients to perform queries, to be efficient for both requesters and responders, and allow the responder to scale in various ways. 1.1. Notation and Convention 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 RFC2119 [RFC2119]. 1.2. Terminology entity - A single logical construct for which metadata may be asserted. Generally this is a network accessible service. metadata - A machine readable description of certain entity characteristics. Generally metadata provides information such as end point references, service contact information, etc. LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 2. Protocol Transport The metadata retrieval protocol seeks to fully employ the features of the HTTP protocol. Additionally this specification makes mandatory some optional HTTP features. 2.1. HTTP Version Metadata retrieval protocol responders MUST use HTTP, version 1.1 [RFC2616] 2.2. HTTP Method All metadata retrieval request MUST use the GET method. 2.3. Request Headers All metadata retrieval requests MUST include the following HTTP headers: Accept - this header MUST contain the content-type identifying the type, or form, of metadata to be retrieved All metadata retrieval requests SHOULD include the following HTTP headers: Accept-Charset Accept-Encoding If-Modified-Since If-None-Match 2.4. Response Headers All metadata retrieval responses MUST include the following headers: Content-Encoding - required if, and only if, content is compressed Content-Type ETag - required if, and only if, the request status code is 200 All metadata retrieval responses SHOULD include the following headers: LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 Cache-Control Content-Length Last-Modified 2.5. Status Codes This protocol uses the following HTTP status codes: 200 - standard response code when returning requested metadata 304 - response code indicating requested metadata has not been updated since the last request 400 - response code indicating that the requester's request was malformed in some fashion 401 - response code indicating the request must be authenticated before requesting metadata 404 - indicates that the requested metadata could not be found; this MUST NOT be used in order to indicate a general service error. 405 - response code indicating that a non-GET method was used 406 - response code indicating that metadata is not available in the request content-type 500 - standard response code when something goes wrong within the responder 501 - response code indicating that a given identifier transformation is not supported 505 - response code indicating that HTTP/1.1 was not used 2.6. Base URL Requests defined in this document are performed by issuing an HTTP GET request to a particular URL. The final component of the path to which requests are issued is defined by the requests specified within this document. A base URL precedes such paths. Such a base URL MUST contain at least the scheme and host name components. It MAY also include a port as well as a path. It MUST NOT include URL fragments. If a path is included the path required by the particular defined request is appended to the path in the base URL. LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 2.7. Content Negotiation As there may be many representations for a given piece of metadata, agent-driven content negotiation is used to ensure the proper representation is delivered to the requester. In addition to the required usage of the Accept header a response SHOULD also support the use of the Accept-Charset header. LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 3. Metadata Query Protocol The metadata query protocol retrieves metadata based on one or more "tag" or "keyword" identifiers. A request may return information for none, one, or a collection of entities. 3.1. Identifiers The query protocol uses identifiers to "tag" metadata for single- and multi-entity metadata collections. An identifier MAY contain any URL-encodable character but MUST NOT start with '{' (ASCII 0x7B) as this character has a special meaning in the first position (see below). The assignment of such identifiers to a particular metadata document is the responsibility of the query responder. If a metadata collection already contains a well known identifier it is RECOMMENDED that such a natural identifier is used when possible. Any given metadata collection MAY have more than one identifier associated with it. 3.1.1. Transforms In some cases it may be advantageous to query for metadata using a transformed identifier. For example, some protocols will transmit hashed entity identifiers. This may be done to reduce the overall size of the identifier, escape special characters, obfuscate the identifier, etc. A transformed identifier is represented by pre-pending the identifier with '{' + transformation indicator + '}'. The transformation indicator MUST be composed exclusively of printable ASCII characters (0x21-0x7E) excluding '{' (0x7B) and '}' (0x7D). Such an identifier need only make sense in the context within which it is used. Responders MUST support the MD5 (transformation indicator 'md5') and SHA1 (transformation indicator 'sha1') hashing algorithms as identifier transformations. The responder MAY support other transformation indicators. For example, the identifier http://example.org/service transformed by means of MD5 hashing would become {md5}f3678248a29ab8e8e5b1b00bee4060e0 3.2. Protocol 3.2.1. Request A Metadata Query request is performed by issuing an HTTP GET request. All Metadata Query requests MUST use the URL format: LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 /entities/{ID}+{ID}+... The request MUST contain at least one identifier but MAY contain more than one. Each identifier must be properly URL encoded. If more than one identifier is used the returned metadata MUST have been labelled with each identifier. That is to say a search with multiple identifiers results in the intersection of the metadata that would be retrieved by searching for each identifier individually. 3.2.2. Response The response to a Metadata Query request MUST be a document that provides metadata for the given request identifiers in the format described by the request's Content-Type header. Note, in the event that multiple identifiers were used in the request, it is the responder's responsibility to ensure that the metadata returned is valid. If the responder can not create a valid document it MUST respond with a 500 status code. An example of such an error would be the case where the result of the query is metadata for multiple entities but the request content type does not support returning multiple results in a single document. 3.2.3. Example Request and Response GET /service/entities/http%3A%2F%2Fexample.org%2Fidp HTTP/1.1 Host: metadata.example.org Accept: application/samlmetadata+xml Example Metadata Query Request HTTP/1.x 200 OK Content-Type: application/samlmetadata+xml ETag: abcdefg Last-Modified: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:45:26 GMT Content-Length: 1234 .... Example Metadata Query Response LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 8] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 4. Efficient Retrieval and Caching 4.1. Conditional Retrieval Upon a successful response the responder is required to return an ETag header and may return a Last-Modified header as well. Requesters SHOULD user either or both, with the ETag being preferred, in any subsequent requests for the same resource. In the event that a resource has not changed since the previous request, the requester will receive a 302 (Not Modified) status code as a response. 4.2. Content Caching Responders SHOULD include cache control information with successful (200 status code) responses, assuming the responder knows when retrieved metadata is meant to expire. The responder should also include cache control information with 404 Not Found responses. This allows the requester to create and maintain a negative-response cache. When cache controls are used only the 'max-age' directive SHOULD be used. 4.3. Content Compression As should be apparent from the required request and response headers this protocol encourages the use of content compression. This is in recognition that some metadata documents can be quite large or fetched with relatively high frequency. Requesters SHOULD support, and advertise support for, gzip compression unless such usage would put exceptional demands on constrained environments. Responders MUST support gzip compression. Requesters and responders MAY support other compression algorithms. LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 9] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 5. Security Considerations 5.1. Integrity As metadata often contains information necessary for the secure operation of interacting services it is RECOMMENDED that some form of content integrity checking be performed. This may include the use of SSL/TLS at the transport layer, digital signatures present within the metadata document, or any other such mechanism. 5.2. Confidentiality In many cases service metadata is public information and therefore confidentiality is not required. In the cases where such functionality is required, it is RECOMMENDED that both the requester and responder support SSL/TLS. Other mechanisms, such as XML encryption, MAY also be supported. 5.3. Authentication All responders which require client authentication to view retrieved information MUST support the use of HTTP basic authentication over SSL/TLS. Responses SHOULD also support the use of X.509 client certificate authentication. LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 10] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 6. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. [RFC2616] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999. LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 11] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 Appendix A. Acknowledgements The editor would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their contributions to this document: Scott Cantor (The Ohio State University) Leif Johansson (TODO) Thomas Lenggenhager (SWITCH) Ian Young (EDINA, University of Edinburgh) LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 12] Internet-Draft Metadata Query Protocol June 2010 Author's Address Chad LaJoie (editor) Itumi, LLC Email: lajoie@itumi.biz LaJoie Expires January 1, 2011 [Page 13]