Batched Token Issuance Protocol

Change Log: RFC EDITOR PLEASE DELETE THIS SECTION. draft-03

Arbitrary token types
Error code 400 aligned with RFC9578 and replaced by error code 422

draft-02

Renaming TokenRequest to BatchTokenRequest and TokenResponse to BatchTokenResponse
IANA: Media types for BatchTokenRequest and BatchTokenResponse
IANA: Expand Token Type registry entry
Various editorial fixes

draft-01

Initial WG document version

Introduction This document specifies two Privacy Pass issuance protocols (as defined in ) that allow for batched issuance of tokens. This allows clients to request more than one token at a time and for issuers to issue more than one token at a time. The base Privacy Pass issuance protocol defines stateless anonymous tokens, which can either be publicly verifiable or not. While it is possible to run multiple instances of the issuance protocol in parallel, e.g., over a multiplexed transport such as HTTP/3 or by orchestrating multiple HTTP requests, these ad-hoc solutions vary based on transport protocol support. In addition, in some cases, they cannot take advantage of cryptographic optimizations. The first variant of the issuance protocol builds upon the privately verifiable issuance protocol in that uses VOPRF , and allows for batched issuance of tokens. This allows clients to request more than one token at a time and for issuers to issue more than one token at a time. In effect, private batched issuance performance scales better than linearly. The second variant of the issuance protocol introduces a new Client-Issuer communication method, which allows for batched issuance of arbitrary token types. This allows clients to request more than one token at a time and for issuers to issue more than one token at a time. This variant has no other effect than batching requests and responses and the issuance performance remains linear. This batched issuance protocol registers one new token type (), to be used with the PrivateToken HTTP authentication scheme defined in .

Motivation Privacy Pass tokens (as defined in and ) are unlinkable during issuance and redemption. The basic issuance protocols defined in however only allow for a single token to be issued at a time for every challenge. In some cases, especially where a large number of clients need to fetch a large number of tokens, this may introduce performance bottlenecks. Batched token issuance improves upon the basic Privately Verifiable Token issuance protocol in the following key ways:

Issuing multiple tokens at once in response to a single TokenChallenge, thereby reducing the size of the proofs required for multiple tokens.
Improving server and client issuance efficiency by amortizing the cost of the VOPRF proof generation and verification, respectively.

For all Verifiable Token issuance protocol, it allows for a single TokenRequest to be sent that encompasses multiple token requests. This enables the issuance of tokens for more than one key in one round trip between the Client and the Issuer. The cost remains linear.

Presentation Language This document uses the TLS presentation language to describe the structure of protocol messages. In addition to the base syntax, it uses two additional features: the ability for fields to be optional and the ability for vectors to have variable-size length headers.

Optional Value An optional value is encoded with a presence-signaling octet, followed by the value itself if present. When decoding, a presence octet with a value other than 0 or 1 MUST be rejected as malformed. ; ]]>

Variable-Size Vector Length Headers In the TLS presentation language, vectors are encoded as a sequence of encoded elements prefixed with a length. The length field has a fixed size set by specifying the minimum and maximum lengths of the encoded sequence of elements. In this document, there are several vectors whose sizes vary over significant ranges. So instead of using a fixed-size length field, it uses a variable-size length using a variable-length integer encoding based on the one described in . They differ only in that the one here requires a minimum-size encoding. Instead of presenting min and max values, the vector description simply includes a V. For example: ; opaque variable; } StructWithVectors; ]]>

Batched Privately Verifiable Token This section describes a batched issuance protocol for select token types, including 0x0001 (defined in ) and 0x0005 (defined in this document). This variant is more efficient than Arbitary Batch Token Issuance defined below. It does so by requiring the same key to be used by all token requests.

Client-to-Issuer Request Except where specified otherwise, the client follows the same protocol as described in . The Client first creates a context as follows: ciphersuiteID is the ciphersuite identifier from corresponding to the ciphersuite being used for this token version. SetupVOPRFClient is defined in . Nr denotes the number of tokens the clients wants to request. For every token, the Client then creates an issuance request message for a random value nonce with the input challenge and Issuer key identifier as described below: token_type corresponds to the 2-octet integer in the challenge. The above is repeated for each token to be requested. Importantly, a fresh nonce MUST be sampled each time. The Client then creates a BatchTokenRequest structured as follows: ; } BatchTokenRequest; ]]> The structure fields are defined as follows:

"token_type" is a 2-octet integer, which matches the type in the challenge.
"truncated_token_key_id" is the least significant byte of the token_key_id in network byte order (in other words, the last 8 bits of token_key_id).
"blinded_elements" is a list of Nr serialized elements, each of length Ne bytes and computed as SerializeElement(blinded_element_i), where blinded_element_i is the i-th output sequence of Blind invocations above. Ne is as defined in .

The Client then generates an HTTP POST request to send to the Issuer Request URL, with the BatchTokenRequest as the content. The media type for this request is "application/private-token-privately-verifiable-batch-request". An example request for the Issuer Request URL "https://issuer.example.net/request" is shown below. ]]>

Issuer-to-Client Response Except where specified otherwise, the client follows the same protocol as described in . Upon receipt of the request, the Issuer validates the following conditions:

The BatchTokenRequest contains a supported token_type equal to one of the batched token types defined in this document.
The BatchTokenRequest.truncated_token_key_id corresponds to a key ID of a Public Key owned by the issuer.
Nr, as determined based on the size of BatchTokenRequest.blinded_elements, is less than or equal to the number of tokens that the issuer can issue in a single batch.

If any of these conditions is not met, the Issuer MUST return an HTTP 422 (Unprocessable Content) error to the client. The Issuer then tries to deseralize the i-th element of BatchTokenRequest.blinded_elements using DeserializeElement from , yielding blinded_element_i of type Element. If this fails for any of the BatchTokenRequest.blinded_elements values, the Issuer MUST return an HTTP 422 (Unprocessable Content) error to the client. Otherwise, if the Issuer is willing to produce a token to the Client, the issuer forms a list of Element values, denoted blinded_elements, and computes a blinded response as follows: ciphersuiteID is the ciphersuite identifier from corresponding to the ciphersuite being used for this token version. SetupVOPRFServer is defined in . The issuer uses a list of blinded elements to compute in the proof generation step. The BlindEvaluateBatch function is a batch-oriented version of the BlindEvaluate function described in . The description of BlindEvaluateBatch is below. The Issuer then creates a BatchTokenResponse structured as follows: ; uint8_t evaluated_proof[Ns + Ns]; } BatchTokenResponse; ]]> The structure fields are defined as follows:

"evaluated_elements" is a list of Nr serialized elements, each of length Ne bytes and computed as SerializeElement(evaluate_element_i), where evaluate_element_i is the i-th output of BlindEvaluate.
"evaluated_proof" is the (Ns+Ns)-octet serialized proof, which is a pair of Scalar values, computed as concat(SerializeScalar(proof[0]), SerializeScalar(proof[1])), where Ns is as defined in .

The Issuer generates an HTTP response with status code 200 whose content consists of TokenResponse, with the content type set as "application/private-token-privately-verifiable-batch-response". ]]>

Finalization Upon receipt, the Client handles the response and, if successful, deserializes the body values TokenResponse.evaluate_response and TokenResponse.evaluate_proof, yielding evaluated_elements and proof. If deserialization of either value fails, the Client aborts the protocol. Otherwise, the Client processes the response as follows: The FinalizeBatch function is a batched variant of the Finalize function as defined in . FinalizeBatch accepts lists of evaluated elements and blinded elements as input parameters, and is implemented as described below: If this succeeds, the Client then constructs Nr Token values, where authenticator is the i-th Nh-byte length slice of authenticator_values that corresponds to nonce, the i-th nonce that was sampled in : If the FinalizeBatch function fails, the Client aborts the protocol. Token verification works exactly as specified in .

Arbitrary Batched Token Issuance This section describes an issuance protocol mechanism for issuing multiple tokens in one round trip between Client and Issuer. An arbitrary batched token request can contain token requests for any token type.

Client-to-Issuer Request The Client first creates all TokenRequest it wants to batch. To do so, the client follows protocol describing issuance, such as or . The Client then creates a BatchedTokenRequest structured as follows: ; } BatchTokenRequest ]]> The structure fields are defined as follows:

TokenRequest's "token_type" is a 2-octet integer. TokenRequest MUST always start with a uint16 "token_type" indicating the token type. The rest of the structure follows based on that type, within the inner opaque token_request attribute. The above definition corresponds to TokenRequest from . A TokenRequest with a token type not defined in MAY be used but MUST always start with a 2-octet token_type.
"token_requests" is an array of TokenRequest satisfying the above constraint.

The Client then generates an HTTP POST request to send to the Issuer Request URL, with the BatchTokenRequest as the content. The media type for this request is "application/private-token-arbitrary-batch-request". An example request for the Issuer Request URL "https://issuer.example.net/request" is shown below. ]]>

Issuer-to-Client Response Upon receipt of the request, the Issuer validates the following conditions:

The Content-Type is application/private-token-arbitrary-batch-request as registered with IANA.

If this condition is not met, the Issuer MUST return an HTTP 422 (Unprocessable Content) error to the client. The Issuer then tries to deserialize the first 2 bytes of the i-th element of BatchTokenRequest.token_requests. If this is not a token type registered with IANA, the Issuer MUST return an HTTP 422 (Unprocessable Content) error to the client. The issuer creates a BatchTokenResponse structured as follows: token_response; /* Defined by token_type */ } OptionalTokenResponse; struct { OptionalTokenResponse token_responses; } BatchTokenResponse ]]> BatchTokenResponse.token_responses is a vector of OptionalTokenResponses, length prefixed with two bytes. OptionalTokenResponse.token_response is a length-prefix-encoded TokenResponse, where a length of 0 indicates that the Issuer failed or refused to issue the associated TokenRequest. The Issuer generates an HTTP response with status code 200 whose content consists of TokenResponse, with the content type set as "application/private-token-arbitrary-batch-response". If the Issuer issues some tokens but not all, it MUST return an HTTP 206 to the client and continue processing further requests. ]]>

Finalization The Client tries to deserialize the i-th element of BatchTokenResponse.token_responses using the protocol associated to BatchTokenRequest.token_type. If the element has a size of 0, the Client MUST ignore this token, and continue processing the next token. The Client finalizes each deserialized TokenResponse using the matching TokenRequest according to the corresponding finalization procedure defined by the token type.

Security considerations

Batched Privately Verifiable Tokens Implementors SHOULD be aware of the security considerations described in and implement mitigation mechanisms. Application can mitigate this issue by limiting the number of clients and limiting the number of token requests per client per key.

Arbitrary Batched Verifiable Tokens Implementors SHOULD be aware of the inherent linear cost of this token type. An Issuer MAY ignore TokenRequest if the number of tokens per request past a limit.

IANA considerations This section contains IANA codepoint allocation requests.

Token Type This document updates the "Token Type" Registry () with the following entry:

Value: 0x0005 (suggested)
Name: VOPRF (ristretto255, SHA-512)
Token Structure: As defined in
Token Key Encoding: Serialized using SerializeElement from
TokenChallenge Structure: As defined in
Publicly Verifiable: N
Public Metadata: N
Private Metadata: N
Nk: 32
Nid: 32
Reference:
Notes: None

Media Types The following entries should be added to the IANA "media types" registry:

"application/private-token-privately-verifiable-batch-request"
"application/private-token-privately-verifiable-batch-response"
"application/private-token-arbitrary-batch-request"
"application/private-token-arbitrary-batch-response"

The templates for these entries are listed below and the reference should be this RFC.

"application/private-token-privately-verifiable-batch-request" media type

Type name:

application

Subtype name:

private-token-request

Required parameters:

N/A

Optional parameters:

N/A

Encoding considerations:

"binary"

Security considerations:

see

Interoperability considerations:

N/A

Published specification:

this specification

Applications that use this media type:

Applications that want to issue or facilitate issuance of Privacy Pass tokens, including Privacy Pass issuer applications themselves.

Fragment identifier considerations:

N/A

Additional information:

Magic number(s):: N/A
Deprecated alias names for this type:: N/A
File extension(s):: N/A
Macintosh file type code(s):: N/A

Person and email address to contact for further information:

see Authors' Addresses section

Intended usage:

COMMON

Restrictions on usage:

N/A

Author:

see Authors' Addresses section

Change controller:

IETF

"application/private-token-privately-verifiable-batch-response" media type

Type name:

application

Subtype name:

private-token-response

Required parameters:

N/A

Optional parameters:

N/A

Encoding considerations:

"binary"

Security considerations:

see

Interoperability considerations:

N/A

Published specification:

this specification

Applications that use this media type:

Applications that want to issue or facilitate issuance of Privacy Pass tokens, including Privacy Pass issuer applications themselves.

Fragment identifier considerations:

N/A

Additional information:

Magic number(s):: N/A
Deprecated alias names for this type:: N/A
File extension(s):: N/A
Macintosh file type code(s):: N/A

Person and email address to contact for further information:

see Authors' Addresses section

Intended usage:

COMMON

Restrictions on usage:

N/A

Author:

see Authors' Addresses section

Change controller:

IETF

"application/private-token-arbitrary-batch-request" media type

Type name:

application

Subtype name:

private-token-request

Required parameters:

N/A

Optional parameters:

N/A

Encoding considerations:

"binary"

Security considerations:

see

Interoperability considerations:

N/A

Published specification:

this specification

Applications that use this media type:

Applications that want to issue or facilitate issuance of Privacy Pass tokens, including Privacy Pass issuer applications themselves.

Fragment identifier considerations:

N/A

Additional information:

Magic number(s):: N/A
Deprecated alias names for this type:: N/A
File extension(s):: N/A
Macintosh file type code(s):: N/A

Person and email address to contact for further information:

see Authors' Addresses section

Intended usage:

COMMON

Restrictions on usage:

N/A

Author:

see Authors' Addresses section

Change controller:

IETF

"application/private-token-arbitrary-batch-response" media type

Type name:

application

Subtype name:

private-token-response

Required parameters:

N/A

Optional parameters:

N/A

Encoding considerations:

"binary"

Security considerations:

see

Interoperability considerations:

N/A

Published specification:

this specification

Applications that use this media type:

Applications that want to issue or facilitate issuance of Privacy Pass tokens, including Privacy Pass issuer applications themselves.

Fragment identifier considerations:

N/A

Additional information:

Magic number(s):: N/A
Deprecated alias names for this type:: N/A
File extension(s):: N/A
Macintosh file type code(s):: N/A

Person and email address to contact for further information:

see Authors' Addresses section

Intended usage:

COMMON

Restrictions on usage:

N/A

Author:

see Authors' Addresses section

Change controller:

IETF