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- _ _ ____ _
- ___| | | | _ \| |
- / __| | | | |_) | |
- | (__| |_| | _ <| |___
- \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
- Things that could be nice to do in the future
- Things to do in project curl. Please tell us what you think, contribute and
- send us patches that improve things!
- Be aware that these are things that we could do, or have once been considered
- things we could do. If you want to work on any of these areas, please
- consider bringing it up for discussions first on the mailing list so that we
- all agree it is still a good idea for the project!
- All bugs documented in the KNOWN_BUGS document are subject for fixing!
- 1. libcurl
- 1.1 TFO support on Windows
- 1.2 Consult %APPDATA% also for .netrc
- 1.3 struct lifreq
- 1.4 alt-svc sharing
- 1.5 get rid of PATH_MAX
- 1.6 native IDN support on macOS
- 1.7 Support HTTP/2 for HTTP(S) proxies
- 1.8 CURLOPT_RESOLVE for any port number
- 1.9 Cache negative name resolves
- 1.10 auto-detect proxy
- 1.11 minimize dependencies with dynamically loaded modules
- 1.12 updated DNS server while running
- 1.13 c-ares and CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION
- 1.14 Typesafe curl_easy_setopt()
- 1.15 Monitor connections in the connection pool
- 1.16 Try to URL encode given URL
- 1.17 Add support for IRIs
- 1.18 try next proxy if one doesn't work
- 1.20 SRV and URI DNS records
- 1.22 CURLINFO_PAUSE_STATE
- 1.23 Offer API to flush the connection pool
- 1.24 TCP Fast Open for windows
- 1.25 Expose tried IP addresses that failed
- 1.27 hardcode the "localhost" addresses
- 1.28 FD_CLOEXEC
- 1.29 Upgrade to websockets
- 1.30 config file parsing
- 2. libcurl - multi interface
- 2.1 More non-blocking
- 2.2 Better support for same name resolves
- 2.3 Non-blocking curl_multi_remove_handle()
- 2.4 Split connect and authentication process
- 2.5 Edge-triggered sockets should work
- 2.6 multi upkeep
- 3. Documentation
- 3.2 Provide cmake config-file
- 4. FTP
- 4.1 HOST
- 4.2 Alter passive/active on failure and retry
- 4.3 Earlier bad letter detection
- 4.5 ASCII support
- 4.6 GSSAPI via Windows SSPI
- 4.7 STAT for LIST without data connection
- 4.8 Option to ignore private IP addresses in PASV response
- 5. HTTP
- 5.1 Better persistency for HTTP 1.0
- 5.2 Set custom client ip when using haproxy protocol
- 5.3 Rearrange request header order
- 5.4 Allow SAN names in HTTP/2 server push
- 5.5 auth= in URLs
- 6. TELNET
- 6.1 ditch stdin
- 6.2 ditch telnet-specific select
- 6.3 feature negotiation debug data
- 7. SMTP
- 7.2 Enhanced capability support
- 7.3 Add CURLOPT_MAIL_CLIENT option
- 8. POP3
- 8.2 Enhanced capability support
- 9. IMAP
- 9.1 Enhanced capability support
- 10. LDAP
- 10.1 SASL based authentication mechanisms
- 10.2 CURLOPT_SSL_CTX_FUNCTION for LDAPS
- 10.3 Paged searches on LDAP server
- 11. SMB
- 11.1 File listing support
- 11.2 Honor file timestamps
- 11.3 Use NTLMv2
- 11.4 Create remote directories
- 12. New protocols
- 13. SSL
- 13.1 TLS-PSK with OpenSSL
- 13.2 Provide mutex locking API
- 13.3 Support in-memory certs/ca certs/keys
- 13.4 Cache/share OpenSSL contexts
- 13.5 Export session ids
- 13.6 Provide callback for cert verification
- 13.7 improve configure --with-ssl
- 13.8 Support DANE
- 13.10 Support Authority Information Access certificate extension (AIA)
- 13.11 Support intermediate & root pinning for PINNEDPUBLICKEY
- 13.12 Support HSTS
- 13.14 Support the clienthello extension
- 14. GnuTLS
- 14.2 check connection
- 15. Schannel
- 15.1 Extend support for client certificate authentication
- 15.2 Extend support for the --ciphers option
- 15.3 Add option to disable client certificate auto-send
- 16. SASL
- 16.1 Other authentication mechanisms
- 16.2 Add QOP support to GSSAPI authentication
- 16.3 Support binary messages (i.e.: non-base64)
- 17. SSH protocols
- 17.1 Multiplexing
- 17.2 Handle growing SFTP files
- 17.3 Support better than MD5 hostkey hash
- 17.4 Support CURLOPT_PREQUOTE
- 18. Command line tool
- 18.1 sync
- 18.2 glob posts
- 18.3 prevent file overwriting
- 18.4 --proxycommand
- 18.5 UTF-8 filenames in Content-Disposition
- 18.6 Option to make -Z merge lined based outputs on stdout
- 18.7 at least N milliseconds between requests
- 18.8 Consider convenience options for JSON and XML?
- 18.9 Choose the name of file in braces for complex URLs
- 18.10 improve how curl works in a windows console window
- 18.11 Windows: set attribute 'archive' for completed downloads
- 18.12 keep running, read instructions from pipe/socket
- 18.15 --retry should resume
- 18.16 send only part of --data
- 18.17 consider file name from the redirected URL with -O ?
- 18.18 retry on network is unreachable
- 18.19 expand ~/ in config files
- 18.20 host name sections in config files
- 19. Build
- 19.1 roffit
- 19.2 Enable PIE and RELRO by default
- 19.3 cmake test suite improvements
- 20. Test suite
- 20.1 SSL tunnel
- 20.2 nicer lacking perl message
- 20.3 more protocols supported
- 20.4 more platforms supported
- 20.5 Add support for concurrent connections
- 20.6 Use the RFC6265 test suite
- 20.7 Support LD_PRELOAD on macOS
- 20.8 Run web-platform-tests url tests
- 20.9 Use "random" ports for the test servers
- 21. Next SONAME bump
- 21.1 http-style HEAD output for FTP
- 21.2 combine error codes
- 21.3 extend CURLOPT_SOCKOPTFUNCTION prototype
- 22. Next major release
- 22.1 cleanup return codes
- 22.2 remove obsolete defines
- 22.3 size_t
- 22.4 remove several functions
- 22.5 remove CURLOPT_FAILONERROR
- 22.7 remove progress meter from libcurl
- 22.8 remove 'curl_httppost' from public
- ==============================================================================
- 1. libcurl
- 1.1 TFO support on Windows
- TCP Fast Open is supported on several platforms but not on Windows. Work on
- this was once started but never finished.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/3378
- 1.2 Consult %APPDATA% also for .netrc
- %APPDATA%\.netrc is not considered when running on Windows. Shouldn't it?
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4016
- 1.3 struct lifreq
- Use 'struct lifreq' and SIOCGLIFADDR instead of 'struct ifreq' and
- SIOCGIFADDR on newer Solaris versions as they claim the latter is obsolete.
- To support IPv6 interface addresses for network interfaces properly.
- 1.4 alt-svc sharing
- The share interface could benefit from allowing the alt-svc cache to be
- possible to share between easy handles.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4476
- 1.5 get rid of PATH_MAX
- Having code use and rely on PATH_MAX is not nice:
- https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/11/pathmax-simply-isnt.html
- Currently the libssh2 SSH based code uses it, but to remove PATH_MAX from
- there we need libssh2 to properly tell us when we pass in a too small buffer
- and its current API (as of libssh2 1.2.7) doesn't.
- 1.6 native IDN support on macOS
- On recent macOS versions, the getaddrinfo() function itself has built-in IDN
- support. By setting the AI_CANONNAME flag, the function will return the
- encoded namne in the ai_canonname struct field in the returned information.
- This could be used by curl on macOS when built without a separate IDN library
- and an IDN host name is used in a URL.
- 1.7 Support HTTP/2 for HTTP(S) proxies
- Support for doing HTTP/2 to HTTP and HTTPS proxies is still missing.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/3570
- 1.8 CURLOPT_RESOLVE for any port number
- This option allows applications to set a replacement IP address for a given
- host + port pair. Consider making support for providing a replacement address
- for the host name on all port numbers.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1264
- 1.9 Cache negative name resolves
- A name resolve that has failed is likely to fail when made again within a
- short period of time. Currently we only cache positive responses.
- 1.10 auto-detect proxy
- libcurl could be made to detect the system proxy setup automatically and use
- that. On Windows, macOS and Linux desktops for example.
- The pull-request to use libproxy for this was deferred due to doubts on the
- reliability of the dependency and how to use it:
- https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/977
- libdetectproxy is a (C++) library for detecting the proxy on Windows
- https://github.com/paulharris/libdetectproxy
- 1.11 minimize dependencies with dynamically loaded modules
- We can create a system with loadable modules/plug-ins, where these modules
- would be the ones that link to 3rd party libs. That would allow us to avoid
- having to load ALL dependencies since only the necessary ones for this
- app/invoke/used protocols would be necessary to load. See
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/349
- 1.12 updated DNS server while running
- If /etc/resolv.conf gets updated while a program using libcurl is running, it
- is may cause name resolves to fail unless res_init() is called. We should
- consider calling res_init() + retry once unconditionally on all name resolve
- failures to mitigate against this. Firefox works like that. Note that Windows
- doesn't have res_init() or an alternative.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2251
- 1.13 c-ares and CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION
- curl will create most sockets via the CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION callback and
- close them with the CURLOPT_CLOSESOCKETFUNCTION callback. However, c-ares
- does not use those functions and instead opens and closes the sockets
- itself. This means that when curl passes the c-ares socket to the
- CURLMOPT_SOCKETFUNCTION it isn't owned by the application like other sockets.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2734
- 1.14 Typesafe curl_easy_setopt()
- One of the most common problems in libcurl using applications is the lack of
- type checks for curl_easy_setopt() which happens because it accepts varargs
- and thus can take any type.
- One possible solution to this is to introduce a few different versions of the
- setopt version for the different kinds of data you can set.
- curl_easy_set_num() - sets a long value
- curl_easy_set_large() - sets a curl_off_t value
- curl_easy_set_ptr() - sets a pointer
- curl_easy_set_cb() - sets a callback PLUS its callback data
- 1.15 Monitor connections in the connection pool
- libcurl's connection cache or pool holds a number of open connections for the
- purpose of possible subsequent connection reuse. It may contain a few up to a
- significant amount of connections. Currently, libcurl leaves all connections
- as they are and first when a connection is iterated over for matching or
- reuse purpose it is verified that it is still alive.
- Those connections may get closed by the server side for idleness or they may
- get a HTTP/2 ping from the peer to verify that they're still alive. By adding
- monitoring of the connections while in the pool, libcurl can detect dead
- connections (and close them) better and earlier, and it can handle HTTP/2
- pings to keep such ones alive even when not actively doing transfers on them.
- 1.16 Try to URL encode given URL
- Given a URL that for example contains spaces, libcurl could have an option
- that would try somewhat harder than it does now and convert spaces to %20 and
- perhaps URL encoded byte values over 128 etc (basically do what the redirect
- following code already does).
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/514
- 1.17 Add support for IRIs
- IRIs (RFC 3987) allow localized, non-ascii, names in the URL. To properly
- support this, curl/libcurl would need to translate/encode the given input
- from the input string encoding into percent encoded output "over the wire".
- To make that work smoothly for curl users even on Windows, curl would
- probably need to be able to convert from several input encodings.
- 1.18 try next proxy if one doesn't work
- Allow an application to specify a list of proxies to try, and failing to
- connect to the first go on and try the next instead until the list is
- exhausted. Browsers support this feature at least when they specify proxies
- using PACs.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/896
- 1.20 SRV and URI DNS records
- Offer support for resolving SRV and URI DNS records for libcurl to know which
- server to connect to for various protocols (including HTTP!).
- 1.22 CURLINFO_PAUSE_STATE
- Return information about the transfer's current pause state, in both
- directions. https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2588
- 1.23 Offer API to flush the connection pool
- Sometimes applications want to flush all the existing connections kept alive.
- An API could allow a forced flush or just a forced loop that would properly
- close all connections that have been closed by the server already.
- 1.24 TCP Fast Open for windows
- libcurl supports the CURLOPT_TCP_FASTOPEN option since 7.49.0 for Linux and
- Mac OS. Windows supports TCP Fast Open starting with Windows 10, version 1607
- and we should add support for it.
- 1.25 Expose tried IP addresses that failed
- When libcurl fails to connect to a host, it should be able to offer the
- application the list of IP addresses that were used in the attempt.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2126
- 1.27 hardcode the "localhost" addresses
- There's this new spec getting adopted that says "localhost" should always and
- unconditionally be a local address and not get resolved by a DNS server. A
- fine way for curl to fix this would be to simply hard-code the response to
- 127.0.0.1 and/or ::1 (depending on what IP versions that are requested). This
- is what the browsers probably will do with this hostname.
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1220810
- https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-let-localhost-be-localhost-02
- 1.28 FD_CLOEXEC
- It sets the close-on-exec flag for the file descriptor, which causes the file
- descriptor to be automatically (and atomically) closed when any of the
- exec-family functions succeed. Should probably be set by default?
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2252
- 1.29 Upgrade to websockets
- libcurl could offer a smoother path to get to a websocket connection.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/3523
- Michael Kaufmann suggestion here:
- https://curl.haxx.se/video/curlup-2017/2017-03-19_05_Michael_Kaufmann_Websocket_support_for_curl.mp4
- 1.30 config file parsing
- Consider providing an API, possibly in a separate companion library, for
- parsing a config file like curl's -K/--config option to allow applications to
- get the same ability to read curl options from files.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/3698
- 2. libcurl - multi interface
- 2.1 More non-blocking
- Make sure we don't ever loop because of non-blocking sockets returning
- EWOULDBLOCK or similar. Blocking cases include:
- - Name resolves on non-windows unless c-ares or the threaded resolver is used.
- - The threaded resolver may block on cleanup:
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4852
- - file:// transfers
- - TELNET transfers
- - GSSAPI authentication for FTP transfers
- - The "DONE" operation (post transfer protocol-specific actions) for the
- protocols SFTP, SMTP, FTP. Fixing Curl_done() for this is a worthy task.
- - curl_multi_remove_handle for any of the above. See section 2.3.
- 2.2 Better support for same name resolves
- If a name resolve has been initiated for name NN and a second easy handle
- wants to resolve that name as well, make it wait for the first resolve to end
- up in the cache instead of doing a second separate resolve. This is
- especially needed when adding many simultaneous handles using the same host
- name when the DNS resolver can get flooded.
- 2.3 Non-blocking curl_multi_remove_handle()
- The multi interface has a few API calls that assume a blocking behavior, like
- add_handle() and remove_handle() which limits what we can do internally. The
- multi API need to be moved even more into a single function that "drives"
- everything in a non-blocking manner and signals when something is done. A
- remove or add would then only ask for the action to get started and then
- multi_perform() etc still be called until the add/remove is completed.
- 2.4 Split connect and authentication process
- The multi interface treats the authentication process as part of the connect
- phase. As such any failures during authentication won't trigger the relevant
- QUIT or LOGOFF for protocols such as IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.
- 2.5 Edge-triggered sockets should work
- The multi_socket API should work with edge-triggered socket events. One of
- the internal actions that need to be improved for this to work perfectly is
- the 'maxloops' handling in transfer.c:readwrite_data().
- 2.6 multi upkeep
- In libcurl 7.62.0 we introduced curl_easy_upkeep. It unfortunately only works
- on easy handles. We should introduces a version of that for the multi handle,
- and also consider doing "upkeep" automatically on connections in the
- connection pool when the multi handle is in used.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/3199
- 3. Documentation
- 3.2 Provide cmake config-file
- A config-file package is a set of files provided by us to allow applications
- to write cmake scripts to find and use libcurl easier. See
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/885
- 4. FTP
- 4.1 HOST
- HOST is a command for a client to tell which host name to use, to offer FTP
- servers named-based virtual hosting:
- https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7151
- 4.2 Alter passive/active on failure and retry
- When trying to connect passively to a server which only supports active
- connections, libcurl returns CURLE_FTP_WEIRD_PASV_REPLY and closes the
- connection. There could be a way to fallback to an active connection (and
- vice versa). https://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1754793
- 4.3 Earlier bad letter detection
- Make the detection of (bad) %0d and %0a codes in FTP URL parts earlier in the
- process to avoid doing a resolve and connect in vain.
- 4.5 ASCII support
- FTP ASCII transfers do not follow RFC959. They don't convert the data
- accordingly.
- 4.6 GSSAPI via Windows SSPI
- In addition to currently supporting the SASL GSSAPI mechanism (Kerberos V5)
- via third-party GSS-API libraries, such as Heimdal or MIT Kerberos, also add
- support for GSSAPI authentication via Windows SSPI.
- 4.7 STAT for LIST without data connection
- Some FTP servers allow STAT for listing directories instead of using LIST,
- and the response is then sent over the control connection instead of as the
- otherwise usedw data connection: https://www.nsftools.com/tips/RawFTP.htm#STAT
- This is not detailed in any FTP specification.
- 4.8 Option to ignore private IP addresses in PASV response
- Some servers respond with and some other FTP client implementations can
- ignore private (RFC 1918 style) IP addresses when received in PASV responses.
- To consider for libcurl as well. See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1455
- 5. HTTP
- 5.1 Better persistency for HTTP 1.0
- "Better" support for persistent connections over HTTP 1.0
- https://curl.haxx.se/bug/feature.cgi?id=1089001
- 5.2 Set custom client ip when using haproxy protocol
- This would allow testing servers with different client ip addresses (without
- using x-forward-for header).
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/5125
- 5.3 Rearrange request header order
- Server implementors often make an effort to detect browser and to reject
- clients it can detect to not match. One of the last details we cannot yet
- control in libcurl's HTTP requests, which also can be exploited to detect
- that libcurl is in fact used even when it tries to impersonate a browser, is
- the order of the request headers. I propose that we introduce a new option in
- which you give headers a value, and then when the HTTP request is built it
- sorts the headers based on that number. We could then have internally created
- headers use a default value so only headers that need to be moved have to be
- specified.
- 5.4 Allow SAN names in HTTP/2 server push
- curl only allows HTTP/2 push promise if the provided :authority header value
- exactly matches the host name given in the URL. It could be extended to allow
- any name that would match the Subject Alternative Names in the server's TLS
- certificate.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/3581
- 5.5 auth= in URLs
- Add the ability to specify the preferred authentication mechanism to use by
- using ;auth=<mech> in the login part of the URL.
- For example:
- http://test:pass;auth=NTLM@example.com would be equivalent to specifying
- --user test:pass;auth=NTLM or --user test:pass --ntlm from the command line.
- Additionally this should be implemented for proxy base URLs as well.
- 6. TELNET
- 6.1 ditch stdin
- Reading input (to send to the remote server) on stdin is a crappy solution
- for library purposes. We need to invent a good way for the application to be
- able to provide the data to send.
- 6.2 ditch telnet-specific select
- Move the telnet support's network select() loop go away and merge the code
- into the main transfer loop. Until this is done, the multi interface won't
- work for telnet.
- 6.3 feature negotiation debug data
- Add telnet feature negotiation data to the debug callback as header data.
- 7. SMTP
- 7.2 Enhanced capability support
- Add the ability, for an application that uses libcurl, to obtain the list of
- capabilities returned from the EHLO command.
- 7.3 Add CURLOPT_MAIL_CLIENT option
- Rather than use the URL to specify the mail client string to present in the
- HELO and EHLO commands, libcurl should support a new CURLOPT specifically for
- specifying this data as the URL is non-standard and to be honest a bit of a
- hack ;-)
- Please see the following thread for more information:
- https://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2012-05/0178.html
- 8. POP3
- 8.2 Enhanced capability support
- Add the ability, for an application that uses libcurl, to obtain the list of
- capabilities returned from the CAPA command.
- 9. IMAP
- 9.1 Enhanced capability support
- Add the ability, for an application that uses libcurl, to obtain the list of
- capabilities returned from the CAPABILITY command.
- 10. LDAP
- 10.1 SASL based authentication mechanisms
- Currently the LDAP module only supports ldap_simple_bind_s() in order to bind
- to an LDAP server. However, this function sends username and password details
- using the simple authentication mechanism (as clear text). However, it should
- be possible to use ldap_bind_s() instead specifying the security context
- information ourselves.
- 10.2 CURLOPT_SSL_CTX_FUNCTION for LDAPS
- CURLOPT_SSL_CTX_FUNCTION works perfectly for HTTPS and email protocols, but
- it has no effect for LDAPS connections.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4108
- 10.3 Paged searches on LDAP server
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4452
- 11. SMB
- 11.1 File listing support
- Add support for listing the contents of a SMB share. The output should probably
- be the same as/similar to FTP.
- 11.2 Honor file timestamps
- The timestamp of the transferred file should reflect that of the original file.
- 11.3 Use NTLMv2
- Currently the SMB authentication uses NTLMv1.
- 11.4 Create remote directories
- Support for creating remote directories when uploading a file to a directory
- that doesn't exist on the server, just like --ftp-create-dirs.
- 12. New protocols
- 13. SSL
- 13.1 TLS-PSK with OpenSSL
- Transport Layer Security pre-shared key ciphersuites (TLS-PSK) is a set of
- cryptographic protocols that provide secure communication based on pre-shared
- keys (PSKs). These pre-shared keys are symmetric keys shared in advance among
- the communicating parties.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/5081
- 13.2 Provide mutex locking API
- Provide a libcurl API for setting mutex callbacks in the underlying SSL
- library, so that the same application code can use mutex-locking
- independently of OpenSSL or GnutTLS being used.
- 13.3 Support in-memory certs/ca certs/keys
- You can specify the private and public keys for SSH/SSL as file paths. Some
- programs want to avoid using files and instead just pass them as in-memory
- data blobs. There's probably a challenge to make this work across the
- plethory of different TLS and SSH backends that curl supports.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2310
- 13.4 Cache/share OpenSSL contexts
- "Look at SSL cafile - quick traces look to me like these are done on every
- request as well, when they should only be necessary once per SSL context (or
- once per handle)". The major improvement we can rather easily do is to make
- sure we don't create and kill a new SSL "context" for every request, but
- instead make one for every connection and re-use that SSL context in the same
- style connections are re-used. It will make us use slightly more memory but
- it will libcurl do less creations and deletions of SSL contexts.
- Technically, the "caching" is probably best implemented by getting added to
- the share interface so that easy handles who want to and can reuse the
- context specify that by sharing with the right properties set.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1110
- 13.5 Export session ids
- Add an interface to libcurl that enables "session IDs" to get
- exported/imported. Cris Bailiff said: "OpenSSL has functions which can
- serialise the current SSL state to a buffer of your choice, and recover/reset
- the state from such a buffer at a later date - this is used by mod_ssl for
- apache to implement and SSL session ID cache".
- 13.6 Provide callback for cert verification
- OpenSSL supports a callback for customised verification of the peer
- certificate, but this doesn't seem to be exposed in the libcurl APIs. Could
- it be? There's so much that could be done if it were!
- 13.7 improve configure --with-ssl
- make the configure --with-ssl option first check for OpenSSL, then GnuTLS,
- then NSS...
- 13.8 Support DANE
- DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) is a way to provide SSL
- keys and certs over DNS using DNSSEC as an alternative to the CA model.
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6698.txt
- An initial patch was posted by Suresh Krishnaswamy on March 7th 2013
- (https://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2013-03/0075.html) but it was a too simple
- approach. See Daniel's comments:
- https://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2013-03/0103.html . libunbound may be the
- correct library to base this development on.
- Björn Stenberg wrote a separate initial take on DANE that was never
- completed.
- 13.10 Support Authority Information Access certificate extension (AIA)
- AIA can provide various things like CRLs but more importantly information
- about intermediate CA certificates that can allow validation path to be
- fulfilled when the HTTPS server doesn't itself provide them.
- Since AIA is about downloading certs on demand to complete a TLS handshake,
- it is probably a bit tricky to get done right.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2793
- 13.11 Support intermediate & root pinning for PINNEDPUBLICKEY
- CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY does not consider the hashes of intermediate & root
- certificates when comparing the pinned keys. Therefore it is not compatible
- with "HTTP Public Key Pinning" as there also intermediate and root certificates
- can be pinned. This is very useful as it prevents webadmins from "locking
- themself out of their servers".
- Adding this feature would make curls pinning 100% compatible to HPKP and allow
- more flexible pinning.
- 13.12 Support HSTS
- "HTTP Strict Transport Security" is TOFU (trust on first use), time-based
- features indicated by a HTTP header send by the webserver. It is widely used
- in browsers and it's purpose is to prevent insecure HTTP connections after
- a previous HTTPS connection. It protects against SSLStripping attacks.
- Doc: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/HTTP_strict_transport_security
- RFC 6797: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797
- 13.14 Support the clienthello extension
- Certain stupid networks and middle boxes have a problem with SSL handshake
- pakets that are within a certain size range because how that sets some bits
- that previously (in older TLS version) were not set. The clienthello
- extension adds padding to avoid that size range.
- https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7685
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2299
- 14. GnuTLS
- 14.2 check connection
- Add a way to check if the connection seems to be alive, to correspond to the
- SSL_peak() way we use with OpenSSL.
- 15. Schannel
- 15.1 Extend support for client certificate authentication
- The existing support for the -E/--cert and --key options could be
- extended by supplying a custom certificate and key in PEM format, see:
- - Getting a Certificate for Schannel
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa375447.aspx
- 15.2 Extend support for the --ciphers option
- The existing support for the --ciphers option could be extended
- by mapping the OpenSSL/GnuTLS cipher suites to the Schannel APIs, see
- - Specifying Schannel Ciphers and Cipher Strengths
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa380161.aspx
- 15.3 Add option to disable client certificate auto-send
- Microsoft says "By default, Schannel will, with no notification to the client,
- attempt to locate a client certificate and send it to the server." That could
- be considered a privacy violation and unexpected.
- Some Windows users have come to expect that default behavior and to change the
- default to make it consistent with other SSL backends would be a breaking
- change. An option should be added that can be used to disable the default
- Schannel auto-send behavior.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2262
- 16. SASL
- 16.1 Other authentication mechanisms
- Add support for other authentication mechanisms such as OLP,
- GSS-SPNEGO and others.
- 16.2 Add QOP support to GSSAPI authentication
- Currently the GSSAPI authentication only supports the default QOP of auth
- (Authentication), whilst Kerberos V5 supports both auth-int (Authentication
- with integrity protection) and auth-conf (Authentication with integrity and
- privacy protection).
- 16.3 Support binary messages (i.e.: non-base64)
- Mandatory to support LDAP SASL authentication.
- 17. SSH protocols
- 17.1 Multiplexing
- SSH is a perfectly fine multiplexed protocols which would allow libcurl to do
- multiple parallel transfers from the same host using the same connection,
- much in the same spirit as HTTP/2 does. libcurl however does not take
- advantage of that ability but will instead always create a new connection for
- new transfers even if an existing connection already exists to the host.
- To fix this, libcurl would have to detect an existing connection and "attach"
- the new transfer to the existing one.
- 17.2 Handle growing SFTP files
- The SFTP code in libcurl checks the file size *before* a transfer starts and
- then proceeds to transfer exactly that amount of data. If the remote file
- grows while the transfer is in progress libcurl won't notice and will not
- adapt. The OpenSSH SFTP command line tool does and libcurl could also just
- attempt to download more to see if there is more to get...
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4344
- 17.3 Support better than MD5 hostkey hash
- libcurl offers the CURLOPT_SSH_HOST_PUBLIC_KEY_MD5 option for verifying the
- server's key. MD5 is generally being deprecated so we should implement
- support for stronger hashing algorithms. libssh2 itself is what provides this
- underlying functionality and it supports at least SHA-1 as an alternative.
- SHA-1 is also being deprecated these days so we should consider working with
- libssh2 to instead offer support for SHA-256 or similar.
- 17.4 Support CURLOPT_PREQUOTE
- The two other QUOTE options are supported for SFTP, but this was left out for
- unknown reasons!
- 18. Command line tool
- 18.1 sync
- "curl --sync http://example.com/feed[1-100].rss" or
- "curl --sync http://example.net/{index,calendar,history}.html"
- Downloads a range or set of URLs using the remote name, but only if the
- remote file is newer than the local file. A Last-Modified HTTP date header
- should also be used to set the mod date on the downloaded file.
- 18.2 glob posts
- Globbing support for -d and -F, as in 'curl -d "name=foo[0-9]" URL'.
- This is easily scripted though.
- 18.3 prevent file overwriting
- Add an option that prevents curl from overwriting existing local files. When
- used, and there already is an existing file with the target file name
- (either -O or -o), a number should be appended (and increased if already
- existing). So that index.html becomes first index.html.1 and then
- index.html.2 etc.
- 18.4 --proxycommand
- Allow the user to make curl run a command and use its stdio to make requests
- and not do any network connection by itself. Example:
- curl --proxycommand 'ssh pi@raspberrypi.local -W 10.1.1.75 80' \
- http://some/otherwise/unavailable/service.php
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4941
- 18.5 UTF-8 filenames in Content-Disposition
- RFC 6266 documents how UTF-8 names can be passed to a client in the
- Content-Disposition header, and curl does not support this.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1888
- 18.6 Option to make -Z merge lined based outputs on stdout
- When a user requests multiple lined based files using -Z and sends them to
- stdout, curl will not "merge" and send complete lines fine but may very well
- send partial lines from several sources.
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/5175
- 18.7 at least N milliseconds between requests
- Allow curl command lines issue a lot of request against services that limit
- users to no more than N requests/second or similar. Could be implemented with
- an option asking that at least a certain time has elapsed since the previous
- request before the next one will be performed. Example:
- $ curl "https://example.com/api?input=[1-1000]" -d yadayada --after 500
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/3920
- 18.8 Consider convenience options for JSON and XML?
- Could we add `--xml` or `--json` to add headers needed to call rest API:
- `--xml` adds -H 'Content-Type: application/xml' -H "Accept: application/xml" and
- `--json` adds -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H "Accept: application/json"
- Setting Content-Type when doing a GET or any other method without a body
- would be a bit strange I think - so maybe only add CT for requests with body?
- Maybe plain `--xml` and ` --json` are a bit too brief and generic. Maybe
- `--http-json` etc?
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/5203
- 18.9 Choose the name of file in braces for complex URLs
- When using braces to download a list of URLs and you use complicated names
- in the list of alternatives, it could be handy to allow curl to use other
- names when saving.
- Consider a way to offer that. Possibly like
- {partURL1:name1,partURL2:name2,partURL3:name3} where the name following the
- colon is the output name.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/221
- 18.10 improve how curl works in a windows console window
- If you pull the scrollbar when transferring with curl in a Windows console
- window, the transfer is interrupted and can get disconnected. This can
- probably be improved. See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/322
- 18.11 Windows: set attribute 'archive' for completed downloads
- The archive bit (FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ARCHIVE, 0x20) separates files that shall be
- backed up from those that are either not ready or have not changed.
- Downloads in progress are neither ready to be backed up, nor should they be
- opened by a different process. Only after a download has been completed it's
- sensible to include it in any integer snapshot or backup of the system.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/3354
- 18.12 keep running, read instructions from pipe/socket
- Provide an option that makes curl not exit after the last URL (or even work
- without a given URL), and then make it read instructions passed on a pipe or
- over a socket to make further instructions so that a second subsequent curl
- invoke can talk to the still running instance and ask for transfers to get
- done, and thus maintain its connection pool, DNS cache and more.
- 18.15 --retry should resume
- When --retry is used and curl actually retries transfer, it should use the
- already transferred data and do a resumed transfer for the rest (when
- possible) so that it doesn't have to transfer the same data again that was
- already transferred before the retry.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1084
- 18.16 send only part of --data
- When the user only wants to send a small piece of the data provided with
- --data or --data-binary, like when that data is a huge file, consider a way
- to specify that curl should only send a piece of that. One suggested syntax
- would be: "--data-binary @largefile.zip!1073741823-2147483647".
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1200
- 18.17 consider file name from the redirected URL with -O ?
- When a user gives a URL and uses -O, and curl follows a redirect to a new
- URL, the file name is not extracted and used from the newly redirected-to URL
- even if the new URL may have a much more sensible file name.
- This is clearly documented and helps for security since there's no surprise
- to users which file name that might get overwritten. But maybe a new option
- could allow for this or maybe -J should imply such a treatment as well as -J
- already allows for the server to decide what file name to use so it already
- provides the "may overwrite any file" risk.
- This is extra tricky if the original URL has no file name part at all since
- then the current code path will error out with an error message, and we can't
- *know* already at that point if curl will be redirected to a URL that has a
- file name...
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1241
- 18.18 retry on network is unreachable
- The --retry option retries transfers on "transient failures". We later added
- --retry-connrefused to also retry for "connection refused" errors.
- Suggestions have been brought to also allow retry on "network is unreachable"
- errors and while totally reasonable, maybe we should consider a way to make
- this more configurable than to add a new option for every new error people
- want to retry for?
- https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/1603
- 18.19 expand ~/ in config files
- For example .curlrc could benefit from being able to do this.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/2317
- 18.20 host name sections in config files
- config files would be more powerful if they could set different
- configurations depending on used URLs, host name or possibly origin. Then a
- default .curlrc could a specific user-agent only when doing requests against
- a certain site.
- 19. Build
- 19.1 roffit
- Consider extending 'roffit' to produce decent ASCII output, and use that
- instead of (g)nroff when building src/tool_hugehelp.c
- 19.2 Enable PIE and RELRO by default
- Especially when having programs that execute curl via the command line, PIE
- renders the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities a lot more
- difficult. This can be attributed to the additional information leaks being
- required to conduct a successful attack. RELRO, on the other hand, masks
- different binary sections like the GOT as read-only and thus kills a handful
- of techniques that come in handy when attackers are able to arbitrarily
- overwrite memory. A few tests showed that enabling these features had close
- to no impact, neither on the performance nor on the general functionality of
- curl.
- 20. Test suite
- 20.1 SSL tunnel
- Make our own version of stunnel for simple port forwarding to enable HTTPS
- and FTP-SSL tests without the stunnel dependency, and it could allow us to
- provide test tools built with either OpenSSL or GnuTLS
- 20.2 nicer lacking perl message
- If perl wasn't found by the configure script, don't attempt to run the tests
- but explain something nice why it doesn't.
- 20.3 more protocols supported
- Extend the test suite to include more protocols. The telnet could just do FTP
- or http operations (for which we have test servers).
- 20.4 more platforms supported
- Make the test suite work on more platforms. OpenBSD and Mac OS. Remove
- fork()s and it should become even more portable.
- 20.5 Add support for concurrent connections
- Tests 836, 882 and 938 were designed to verify that separate connections
- aren't used when using different login credentials in protocols that
- shouldn't re-use a connection under such circumstances.
- Unfortunately, ftpserver.pl doesn't appear to support multiple concurrent
- connections. The read while() loop seems to loop until it receives a
- disconnect from the client, where it then enters the waiting for connections
- loop. When the client opens a second connection to the server, the first
- connection hasn't been dropped (unless it has been forced - which we
- shouldn't do in these tests) and thus the wait for connections loop is never
- entered to receive the second connection.
- 20.6 Use the RFC6265 test suite
- A test suite made for HTTP cookies (RFC 6265) by Adam Barth is available at
- https://github.com/abarth/http-state/tree/master/tests
- It'd be really awesome if someone would write a script/setup that would run
- curl with that test suite and detect deviances. Ideally, that would even be
- incorporated into our regular test suite.
- 20.7 Support LD_PRELOAD on macOS
- LD_RELOAD doesn't work on macOS, but there are tests which require it to run
- properly. Look into making the preload support in runtests.pl portable such
- that it uses DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES on macOS.
- 20.8 Run web-platform-tests url tests
- Run web-platform-tests url tests and compare results with browsers on wpt.fyi
- It would help us find issues to fix and help us document where our parser
- differs from the WHATWG URL spec parsers.
- See https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/4477
- 20.9 Use "random" ports for the test servers
- Instead of insisting and using fixed port numbers for the tests (even though
- they can be changed with a switch), consider letting each server pick a
- random available one at start-up, store that info in a file and let the test
- suite use that.
- We could then remove the "check that it is our server that's running"-check
- and we would immediately detect when we write tests wrongly to use hard-coded
- port numbers.
- 21. Next SONAME bump
- 21.1 http-style HEAD output for FTP
- #undef CURL_FTP_HTTPSTYLE_HEAD in lib/ftp.c to remove the HTTP-style headers
- from being output in NOBODY requests over FTP
- 21.2 combine error codes
- Combine some of the error codes to remove duplicates. The original
- numbering should not be changed, and the old identifiers would be
- macroed to the new ones in an CURL_NO_OLDIES section to help with
- backward compatibility.
- Candidates for removal and their replacements:
- CURLE_FILE_COULDNT_READ_FILE => CURLE_REMOTE_FILE_NOT_FOUND
- CURLE_FTP_COULDNT_RETR_FILE => CURLE_REMOTE_FILE_NOT_FOUND
- CURLE_FTP_COULDNT_USE_REST => CURLE_RANGE_ERROR
- CURLE_FUNCTION_NOT_FOUND => CURLE_FAILED_INIT
- CURLE_LDAP_INVALID_URL => CURLE_URL_MALFORMAT
- CURLE_TFTP_NOSUCHUSER => CURLE_TFTP_ILLEGAL
- CURLE_TFTP_NOTFOUND => CURLE_REMOTE_FILE_NOT_FOUND
- CURLE_TFTP_PERM => CURLE_REMOTE_ACCESS_DENIED
- 21.3 extend CURLOPT_SOCKOPTFUNCTION prototype
- The current prototype only provides 'purpose' that tells what the
- connection/socket is for, but not any protocol or similar. It makes it hard
- for applications to differentiate on TCP vs UDP and even HTTP vs FTP and
- similar.
- 22. Next major release
- 22.1 cleanup return codes
- curl_easy_cleanup() returns void, but curl_multi_cleanup() returns a
- CURLMcode. These should be changed to be the same.
- 22.2 remove obsolete defines
- remove obsolete defines from curl/curl.h
- 22.3 size_t
- make several functions use size_t instead of int in their APIs
- 22.4 remove several functions
- remove the following functions from the public API:
- curl_getenv
- curl_mprintf (and variations)
- curl_strequal
- curl_strnequal
- They will instead become curlx_ - alternatives. That makes the curl app
- still capable of using them, by building with them from source.
- These functions have no purpose anymore:
- curl_multi_socket
- curl_multi_socket_all
- 22.5 remove CURLOPT_FAILONERROR
- Remove support for CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, it has gotten too kludgy and weird
- internally. Let the app judge success or not for itself.
- 22.7 remove progress meter from libcurl
- The internally provided progress meter output doesn't belong in the library.
- Basically no application wants it (apart from curl) but instead applications
- can and should do their own progress meters using the progress callback.
- The progress callback should then be bumped as well to get proper 64bit
- variable types passed to it instead of doubles so that big files work
- correctly.
- 22.8 remove 'curl_httppost' from public
- curl_formadd() was made to fill in a public struct, but the fact that the
- struct is public is never really used by application for their own advantage
- but instead often restricts how the form functions can or can't be modified.
- Changing them to return a private handle will benefit the implementation and
- allow us much greater freedoms while still maintaining a solid API and ABI.
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