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HTTPsec Authentication Protocol

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Preamble

1. Introduction

1.1. Editorial Conventions

1.2. Terms

1.3. Identifiers

2. Summary

2.1. Authentication Model

2.2. Peer Identifiers

2.3. Protocol Operation

2.3.1. Initialization

2.3.2. Continuation

3. Protocol Messages

3.1. Initialization Messages

3.1.1. Initialization Request

3.1.2. Initialization Response

3.2. Continuation Messages

3.2.1. Continuation Request

3.2.2. Continuation Response

3.3. Challenge Messages

3.3.1. Challenge Response

3.4. Message Flow

4. Protocol Directives

4.1. id

4.2. dh

4.3. certificate

4.4. url

4.5. group

4.6. nonce

4.7. auth

4.8. token

4.9. signature

4.10. count

4.11. mac

4.12. digest

5. Other Headers

5.1. Content-Encoding

5.2. Cache-Control

5.3. Expires

6. Protocol Computations

6.1. Algorithms

6.1.1. Hash Algorithm

6.1.2. Public Key Algorithm

6.1.3. Encryption Scheme

6.1.4. Signature Scheme

6.1.5. Block Cipher

6.1.6. Block Cipher Mode

6.2. Header Canonicalization

6.3. Initialization Transcript

6.4. Continuation Request Transcript

6.5. Continuation Response Transcript

6.6. Shared Secret

6.7. Keys

6.7.1. MAC Keys

6.7.2. Cipher Keys

6.8. Message Body Ciphering

7. Message Validation

7.1. Initialization Request Validation

7.2. Initialization Response Validation

7.3. Continuation Request Validation

7.4. Continuation Response Validation

8. Cache Considerations

9. Security Considerations

10. References

11. Editor Address

1. Introduction

This specification describes a public key authentication scheme for HTTP transactions. It provides a minimal HTTP extension for mutual authentication and message origin authentication. It offers integrity protection of a defined set of HTTP message headers, message sequence integrity, content integrity, and content ciphering.

This scheme is designed to fit into the generic authentication framework of RFC2616 [HTTP], as exploited in RFC2617 [HTTP-Authentication].