| Internet-Draft | PSI HTTP | October 2026 |
| Singh | Expires 16 April 2027 | [Page] |
This document defines the Compliance-Receipt HTTP response header field, a Structured Field that carries a reference to a Proof of Stateful Integrity (PSI) receipt for the response. The signature covers every security-relevant parameter. The header shows that the issuer sealed a digest of the response; despite its name it does not show that the response, or the service, complies with any law or policy.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶
This Internet-Draft will expire on 16 April 2027.¶
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶
Clients that receive machine-generated responses may want a durable, independently checkable record that a given response was issued. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", and "MAY" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
Compliance-Receipt is a Dictionary Structured Field [RFC9651]. Members:¶
v: Integer, version; this document defines 1.¶
rid: String, receipt identifier.¶
h: Byte Sequence, SHA-256 of the response content.¶
st: Token, one of sealed or pending.¶
kid: String, signing key identifier.¶
sig: Byte Sequence, Ed25519 signature.¶
All members except sig are REQUIRED. Unknown members MUST be ignored. A field that fails to parse, repeats a member, or lacks a required member MUST be treated as absent.¶
Compliance-Receipt: v=1, rid="APEX-NTR-1EEBEA8EE8EBF44A", h=:<base64>:, st=sealed, kid="apex-psi-2026", sig=:<base64>:¶
The signature input is the serialization, per Section 4.1 of [RFC9651], of the Dictionary containing all members other than sig, in the order v, rid, h, st, kid. Signing only rid would allow status or digest substitution and is not permitted. The signature is Ed25519 [RFC8032]; keys are discovered from /.well-known/compliance-receipt on the issuer origin.¶
A client recomputes SHA-256 of the received content, compares it with h, reconstructs the signature input, and verifies sig. It MAY then resolve rid to the full receipt. Status pending MUST NOT be presented as anchored.¶
The header is set by the server; an intermediary able to rewrite responses can strip it. It binds content, not the identity of the requester. Content encodings change bytes; h is over the content as received after removing transfer codings but before content decoding.¶
This document has no IANA actions in this revision. Registration in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Field Name Registry will be requested only if this document advances.¶