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Add RFC-002: CORS and authn for Go
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Add an RFC for creating CORS and authentication packages for users of
Connect in Go.
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akshayjshah committed Jan 11, 2024
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56 changes: 56 additions & 0 deletions docs/governance/rfc/002-go-cors-authn.md
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# 002: CORS and authn for Go

This RFC proposes adding two ancillary Go projects to the Connect Github
organization:

* `connectrpc.com/cors`, which eases server-side CORS configuration, and
* `connectrpc.com/authn`, which provides flexible server-side authentication
middleware.

## CORS

[Cross-origin resource sharing][cors], commonly called CORS, allows servers to
indicate whether web browsers should allow scripts to load resources from other
domains. This is a common concern for single-page web applications, where the
API and app are often hosted on different origins — for example,
`app.acme.com` may need to call APIs hosted on `api.acme.com`. As part of its
security model, CORS requires servers to allowlist individual request and
response headers.

For backend-to-backend communication, the Connect runtime abstracts away
protocol-specific headers. But to correctly configure header allowlists for
CORS, server authors must first understand quite a bit of the gRPC, gRPC-Web,
and Connect protocols. The [resulting configuration][explicit-cors] is verbose
and difficult to evolve with the underlying protocols.

To make development of browser-facing Connect APIs easier in Go, we propose
creating a small Go package of CORS helpers. This package will help users
configure existing CORS packages (for example, [`github.com/rs/cors`][rs-cors]) without
needing to explicitly list all the HTTP headers used by each RPC protocol.

## Authentication

HTTP servers use a variety of authentication schemes: mutual TLS, cookies,
and various types of bearer tokens are particularly common. Often, the
authentication logic also requires some knowledge of the service schema —
at least the name of the service and method, but sometimes more detailed
information too.

In Go, authentication checks are best implemented as `net/http` middleware.
This approach lets servers reject unauthenticated requests early, before
spending cycles decompressing and unmarshaling the payload, and it works
equally well for all authentication schemes. However, experience has shown that
many users attempt to implement their checks using Connect interceptors, which
run _after_ decompression and unmarshaling and don't have access to transport
details like TLS state.

To make it easier for users to secure their servers, we propose creating a Go
package for authenticating requests. Users will supply the actual
authentication function, which will have access to both low-level transport
information and some high-level RPC information. Additionally, it will
standardize a mechanism for propagating authenticated callers' identity to
subsequent middlewares, interceptors, and service implementations.

[cors]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS
[explicit-cors]: https://connectrpc.com/docs/cors/#allowing-methods-and-headers
[rs-cors]: https://github.com/rs/cors
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions docs/governance/rfc/_category_.yml
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label: "RFCs"

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