HTTP is an amazingly powerful protocol, and it's the lifeblood of the internet today. On the surface, it seems to be a simple protocol: send a request to a server and get back a response, and everything's structured in useful ways. HTTPS adds the TLS protocol to secure the connections between endpoints, protecting the messages with encryption and keeping them away from attacker's eyes. But what if you want to be sure the sender is the right sender, and what you see is what they sent? What if you've got a more complex deployment, with proxies and gateways in between your endpoints that mess with the contents of the message? What if you need assurances on the response as well as the request, and to tie them together? People have been trying to sign HTTP messages in various ways for a long time, but only recently has the HTTP Working Group picked up the problem. Come hear about the HTTP Message Signatures work from the draft specification's authors and see how it works, how to apply it, and talk about how it could change how we use the web.
