c_in_depth

:authority header in http


q).what is :authority header?
a)
The :authority header is a HTTP header field that specifies the authority portion of the target URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). It is used in the HTTP/2 protocol, which is an update to the HTTP protocol used for communication on the World Wide Web.

In HTTP/2, the :authority header is equivalent to the Host header field in HTTP/1.1. It is used to identify the host and port number of the server to which the request is being sent.
It should include the port, if the port isn’t the default for the scheme.

q).How we are using :authority header ?
The :authority header is used by the client (such as a web browser) to identify the server that it is trying to connect to. It is included in the request headers sent by the client and is used by the server to determine which resource the client is requesting.

For example, the following HTTP/2 request includes a :authority header field with the value “example.com”:

:authority: example.com
:method: GET
:path: /index.html
:scheme: https

This request is requesting the resource at the URL “https://example.com/index.html” using the HTTP GET method.

q) why :authority introduced in http header?
a).
The :authority header was introduced in HTTP/2 as a replacement for the Host header used in HTTP/1.1.
The :authority header is used to identify the authority responsible for the resource being requested, and is included in the request headers sent by the client (such as a web browser).

q) How we address :authority header in place of :Host header in Http ?
a).
In HTTP/2, the :authority header replaces the Host header used in HTTP/1.1, which is used to specify the domain name of the server being requested.

  1. Improved security: The :authority header allows the client and server to verify each other’s identity and establish a secure connection, helping to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
  2. Improved performance: The :authority header allows the client to establish multiple connections to the same server, improving the performance of HTTP/2 compared to HTTP/1.1.
  3. Simplified header format: The :authority header is included in the request headers, rather than the Host header, which allows for a more streamlined header format and reduces the number of headers that need to be transmitted.

Overall, the :authority header was introduced in HTTP/2 to improve the security, performance, and simplicity of the HTTP protocol.

q).Example of :authority header in http?
a)

The :authority header is a field in the HTTP/2 protocol that is used to identify the authority responsible for the resource being requested.

Here is an example of the :authority header being used in an HTTP/2 request:
In this example, the :authority header is set to www.example.com, which specifies the domain name of the server being requested.

GET /index.html HTTP/2
:authority: www.example.com
:method: GET
:path: /index.html
:scheme: https
accept: text/html
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.88 Safari/537.36




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