RFC - 2817

Upgrading to TLS Within HTTP/1.1

Original:	ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2817.txt
Authors:	R. Khare [4K Associates / UC Irvine], S. Lawrence [Agranat Systems, Inc.]
Date:	May 2000
Category:	Informational

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Updates:
RFC-2616draft	Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 (Updated by RFC-2817)

Referred by:	11 RFC
Refers to:	9 RFC

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Status

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 (2000). All Rights Reserved

Abstract

This memo explains how to use the Upgrade mechanism in HTTP/1.1 to initiate Transport Layer Security (TLS) over an existing TCP connection. This allows unsecured and secured HTTP traffic to share the same well known port (in this case, http: at 80 rather than https: at 443). It also enables "virtual hosting", so a single HTTP + TLS server can disambiguate traffic intended for several hostnames at a single IP address.

Since HTTP/1.1 [1] defines Upgrade as a hop-by-hop mechanism, this memo also documents the HTTP CONNECT method for establishing end-to- end tunnels across HTTP proxies. Finally, this memo establishes new IANA registries for public HTTP status codes, as well as public or private Upgrade product tokens.

This memo does NOT affect the current definition of the 'https' URI scheme, which already defines a separate namespace (http://example.org/ and https://example.org/ are not equivalent).

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