XMPP protocol extensions already define methods for peer-to-peer file transfer such as &xep0096; or &xep0234; however due to their very nature of being peer-to-peer they don't work very well in scenarios where it is requeried to send a file to multiple recipients or multiple resources of the same recipient at once. They also don’t work alongside offline storage, MUC history and &xep0313;.

Uploading files manually to an HTTP server and sharing the link has been a workaround for this for a long time now. While users have a variety of services to choose from the downside of this manual approach is that an XMPP client can not automate this process on behalf of the user since these services don’t share a common API. Furthermore using a third party service would probably require the user to enter additional credentials into their XMPP client specifically for the file upload.

This XEP defines an approach to request permissions from another entity to upload a file to a specific path on an HTTP server and at the same time receive an URL from which that file can later be downloaded again. These tuples consisting of a PUT and a GET-URL are called slots.

• Be as easy to implement as possible. This is grounded on the idea that most programming languages already have HTTP libraries available.
• Be agnostic toward the distribution of the actual URL. Users can choose to send the URL in the body of a message stanza, utilize &xep0066;, &xep0370;, or even use it as their avatar in &xep0084;
• Do not provide any kind of access control or security for file retrieval beyond Transport Layer Security in form of HTTPS and long random paths that are impossible to guess. That means everyone who knows the URL SHOULD be able to access it.

An entity advertises support for this protocol by including the "urn:xmpp:http:upload:0" in its service discovery information features as specified in &xep0030; or section 6.3 of &xep0115;. To avoid unnecessary round trips an entity SHOULD also include the maximum file size as specified in &xep0128; if such a limitation exists. The field name MUST be "max-file-size" and the value MUST be in bytes.

A user’s server SHOULD include any known entities that provide such services into its service discovery items.

A client requests a new upload slot by sending an IQ-get to the upload service containing a <request> child element qualified by the urn:xmpp:http:upload:0 namespace. This element MUST include the attributes filename and size containing the file name and size respectively.

An additional attribute content-type containing the Content-Type is OPTIONAL.

The upload service responds with both a PUT and a GET URL wrapped by a <slot> element. The service SHOULD keep the file name and especially the file ending intact. Using the same hostname for PUT and GET is OPTIONAL. The host MUST provide Transport Layer Security (&rfc5246;).

The <put> element MAY also contain an unlimited number of <header> elements which correspond to HTTP header fields. Each <header> element MUST have a name-attribute and a content with the value of the header.

Instead of providing the client with a slot the service MAY respond with an error if the requested file size is too large.

For any other type of error the service SHOULD respond with appropriate error types to indicate temporary or permanent errors.

The actual upload of the file happens via HTTP-PUT and is out of scope of this document. The upload service MUST reject the file upload if the Content-Length does not match the size of the slot request. The service SHOULD reject the file if the Content-Type has been specified beforehand and does not match. The service MAY assume application/octet-stream as a Content-Type if it the client did not specify a Content-Type at all.

In addition to the Content-Length and Content-Type header the client MUST also include all additional headers that came with the slot assignment.

There is no further XMPP communication required between the upload service and the client. A HTTP status Code of 201 means that the server is now ready to serve the file via the provided GET URL. If the upload fails for whatever reasons the client MAY request a new slot.

The upload service SHOULD choose an appropriate timeout for the validity of the PUT URL. Since there is no reason for a client to wait between requesting the slot and starting the upload, relatively low timeout values of around 60s are RECOMMENDED.

It is RECOMMENDED that the service stores the files for as long as possible which is of course limited by storage capacity. A service MAY choose to store the latest x MiB of a given user.

• Client implementors MUST consider the fact that without additional end-to-end-encryption files uploaded to a service described in this document will store those files in plain text on that service. Client implementors SHOULD either use this only for semi public files (for example files shared in a public MUC or a PEP Avatar) or implement appropriate end-to-end encryption.
• Service implementors SHOULD use long randomized parts in their URLs making it impossible to guess the location of arbitrary files
• Server operators SHOULD consider the responsibility that comes with storing user data and MAY consider appropriate measures such as full disk encryption.

This document requires no interaction with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

tbd