RFC2616

Publicated on : 1192604434
Quite often I get into discussions about security or hacking and then I usually ask the person if he or she ever read some RFC documents in his or her life. Usually I start with the basic question: Have you ever read the RFC 2616? And in fact I do not know of one person who completely read it. So here it is, from time to time I will post a RFC document, just for the sake of what it has to say. If you really want to understand everything I talked about, you really have to read it. Every security risk I know of has to do with it. If one fully comprehends it, you will see that a lot of mistakes are made because people never read it.



Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

Status of this Memo

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level
protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information
systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for
many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and
distributed object management systems, through extension of its
request methods, error codes and headers [47]. A feature of HTTP is
the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems
to be built independently of the data being transferred.

HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information
initiative since 1990. This specification defines the protocol
referred to as "HTTP/1.1"

Table of Contents

1 Introduction ...................................................7
1.1 Purpose......................................................7
1.2 Requirements .................................................8
1.3 Terminology ..................................................8
1.4 Overall Operation ...........................................12
2 Notational Conventions and Generic Grammar ....................14
2.1 Augmented BNF ...............................................14
2.2 Basic Rules .................................................15
3 Protocol Parameters ...........................................17
3.1 HTTP Version ................................................17
3.2 Uniform Resource Identifiers ................................18
3.2.1 General Syntax ...........................................19
3.2.2 http URL .................................................19
3.2.3 URI Comparison ...........................................20
3.3 Date/Time Formats