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 a 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. Only the following header names are allowed: Authorization, Cookie, Expires. Other header names MUST be ignored by the requesting entity and MUST NOT be included in the HTTP request. The requesting entity MUST strip any newline characters from the header name and value before performing the HTTP request.

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.

For temporary errors such as exceeding a personal quota the service MAY include a <retry/> element qualified by the urn:xmpp:http:upload:0 namespace as a child of the <error/> element. The retry element MUST include an attribute 'stamp' which indicates the time at which the requesting entity may try again. The format of the timestamp MUST adhere to the date-time format specified in &xep0082; and MUST be expressed in UTC.

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 include all allowed 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.

• 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.
• Requesting entities MUST strip any newline characters from the HTTP header names and values before making the PUT request.
• Requesting entities MUST ensure that only the headers that are explicitly allowed by this XEP (Authorization, Cookie, Expires) are copied from the slot response to the HTTP request.
• Service implementors SHOULD use long randomized parts in their URLs making it impossible to guess the location of arbitrary files

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

tbd