Web of Things (WoT) Discovery

W3C Editor's Draft

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Andrea Cimmino ( Universidad Politécnica de Madrid )
Michael McCool ( Intel Corp. )
Farshid Tavakolizadeh ( Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft )
Kunihiko Toumura ( Hitachi, Ltd. )
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Copyright © 2017-2022 W3C ® ( MIT , ERCIM , Keio , Beihang ). W3C liability , trademark and permissive document license rules apply.

Abstract

The W3C Web of Things (WoT) is intended to enable interoperability across IoT platforms and application domains. One key mechanism for accomplishing this goal is the definition and use of metadata describing the interactions an IoT device or service makes available over the network at a suitable level of abstraction. The WoT Thing Description specification satisfies this objective.

However, in order to use a Thing its Thing Description first has to be obtained. The WoT Discovery process described in this document addresses this problem. WoT Discovery needs to support the distribution of WoT Thing Descriptions in a variety of use cases. This includes ad-hoc and engineered systems; during development and at runtime; and on both local and global networks. The process also needs to work with existing discovery mechanisms, be secure, protect private information, and be able to efficiently handle updates to WoT Thing Descriptions and the dynamic and diverse nature of the IoT ecosystem.

The WoT Discovery process is divided into two phases, Introduction, and Exploration. The Introduction phase leverages existing discovery mechanisms but does not directly expose metadata; they are simply used to discover Exploration services, which provide metadata but only after secure authentication and authorization. This document normatively defines two Exploration services: for distributing a single WoT Thing Description from a regular web service, including as a special case self-description; and a searchable WoT Thing Description Directory service for collections of Thing Descriptions. A variety of Introduction services are also described and where necessary normative definitions are given to support them.

Status of This Document

This is a preview

Do not attempt to implement this version of the specification. Do not reference this version as authoritative in any way. Instead, see https://w3c.github.io/wot-discovery/ for the Editor's draft.

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at https://www.w3.org/TR/.

This document was published by the Web of Things Working Group as an Editor's Draft.

Publication as an Editor's Draft does not imply endorsement by W3C and its Members.

This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.

This document was produced by a group operating under the 1 August 2017 W3C Patent Policy . W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy .

This document is governed by the 2 November 2021 W3C Process Document .

1. Introduction

The Web of Things (WoT) defines an architecture that supports the integration and use of web technologies with IoT devices. The WoT Architecture [ wot-architecture11 ] document defines the basic concepts and patterns of usage supported. However, the WoT Thing Description [ wot-thing-description11 ] is a key specification for WoT Discovery since it is the purpose of WoT Discovery to make WoT Thing Descriptions available. Specifically, WoT Discovery has to allow authenticated and authorized entities (and only those entities) to find WoT Thing Descriptions satisfying a set of criteria, such as being near a certain location, or having certain semantics, or containing certain interactions. Conversely, in order to support security and privacy objectives, the WoT Discovery process must not leak information to unauthorized entities. This includes leaking information that a given entity is requesting certain information, not just the information distributed in the Thing Descriptions themselves.

There are already a number of discovery mechanisms defined, so we have to establish why we are proposing a new one. First, many existing discovery mechanisms have relatively weak security and privacy protections. One of our objectives is to establish a mechanism that not only uses best practices to protect metadata, but that can be upgraded to support future best practices as needed. Second, we are using discovery in a broad sense to include both local and non-local mechanisms. While a local mechanism might use a broadcast protocol, non-local mechanisms might go beyond the current network segment where broadcast is not scalable, and so a different approach, such as a search service, is needed. Our approach is to use existing mechanisms as needed to bootstrap into a more general and secure metadata distribution system. Third, the metadata we are distributing, the WoT Thing Description, is highly structured and includes rich data such as data schemas and semantic annotations. Existing discovery mechanisms based on a list of simple key-value pairs are not appropriate. At the same time, use of existing standards for semantic data query, such as SPARQL [ SPARQL11-OVERVIEW ], while potentially suitable for some advanced use cases, might require too much effort for many anticipated IoT applications. Therefore in order to address more basic applications, we also define some simpler query mechanisms.

After defining some basic terminology, we will summarize the basic use cases and requirements for WoT Discovery. These are a subset of the more detailed and exhaustive use cases and requirements presented in the WoT Use Cases [ wot-usecases ] and WoT Architecture [ wot-architecture11 ] documents. Then we will describe the basic architecture of the WoT Discovery process, which uses a two-phase Introduction/Exploration approach. The basic goal of this architecture is to be able to use existing discovery standards to bootstrap access to protected discovery services, but to distribute detailed metadata only to authorized users, and to also protect those making queries from eavesdroppers as much as possible. We then describe details of specific Introduction and Exploration mechanisms. In particular, we define in detail a normative API for a WoT Thing Description Directory (WoT TDD) service that provides a search mechanism for collections of WoT Thing Descriptions that can be dynamically registered by Things or entities acting on their behalf. The WoT Discovery mechanism however also supports distribution of single TDs from regular web services, with a special case of this being self-description. Finally, we discuss some security and privacy considerations, including a set of potential risks and mitigations.

2. Conformance

As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.

The key words MAY , MUST , OPTIONAL , RECOMMENDED , SHOULD , and SHOULD NOT in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [ RFC2119 ] [ RFC8174 ] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

3. Terminology

This section is non-normative.

The fundamental WoT terminology such as Thing , Thing Description ( TD ), Thing Model ( TM ), Property , Action , Event , Anonymous TD , Discoverer , Discovery , Exploration , Introduction , Thing Description Server ( TD Server ), Thing Description Directory ( TDD ), Partial TD , Enriched TD are defined in Section 3 of the WoT Architecture 1.1 specification [ wot-architecture11 ].

4. Architecture

This section is non-normative.

Figure 1 shows an overview of the WoT Discovery process. Discovery uses a two-phase architecture to resolve the competing requirements to be both open and to restrict access to metadata to authorized entities. In the first phase, one or more of a set of relatively open "Introduction" mechanisms may be used to generate a set of candidate URLs. These URLs do not themselves contain metadata, but are used in the second stage to reference "Exploration" services that can actually provide metadata, after authentication, in the form of Thing Descriptions .

Discovery process overview
Figure 1 Discovery architecture overview. A set of open Introduction mechanisms provides a set of URLs, which point at Exploration services that only provide metadata (TDs) after suitable authentication. Thing Links and Thing Description Directories provide additional flexibility but retrieving further results from these is at the discretion of the application.

The intention is that Introduction mechanisms are relatively open "first contact" mechanisms to provide a starting point for the rest of the Discovery process. In this document we specify details on several Introduction mechanisms, suitable for different use cases, including both local and non-local scenarios, but Introductions can in fact be provided by any mechanism that can return a URL. Introductions, however, do not include any security or privacy controls and so should not provide metadata directly. Instead, the URLs provided by Introduction mechanisms reference "Exploration" services. Exploration services actually do provide metadata, but only after suitable authentication and access controls have been applied.

The Discovery process can produce a set of URLs as output from its Introduction phase, even if only one Introduction mechanism is used (some Introduction mechanisms can themselves return multiple URLs). The final output after the Exploration phase can also be a set of Thing Descriptions.

Each URL provided by the Introduction phase always points at an Exploration service endpoint that will return a single Thing Description. In the simplest case this URL references an ordinary resource provided by a web server which provides the Thing Description of a Thing describing an IoT endpoint device. As a special case of this, for self-describing Things an Introduction URL might point directly at an endpoint provided by a Thing serving its own Thing Description.

In general Thing Descriptions might be provided in various ways and in particular may not be self-describing. For example,

The Thing Description for such Things should be provided by separate services.

This document specifies two special cases that allow for more flexibility:

It is not mandatory for the Discovery process to retrieve the contents of Thing Description Directories and return them as part of the results, because in general this might result in a huge set of results. Instead the application should scan the results for Thing Description Directory TDs and decide whether to retrieve TDs from them, possibly selectively. Likewise, it is not required to follow Thing Links automatically; instead the application may choose to follow them selectively.

5. Discoverer Process

In this section we will describe the WoT Discovery process from the point of view of a client, and what it means to say that a client supports WoT Discovery. We will use the term Discoverer for an entity that is a client of the WoT Discovery process. A Discoverer may or may not be a full Consumer. A Discoverer does however need to read and extract information from special TDs for Directories and Thing Links and use specific affordances and links provided in them. Conversely, a Consumer may not support Discovery, although it is recommended [ wot-architecture11 ].

Editor's note : Consumers SHOULD support Discovery

Note: the WoT Architecture specification only says that Consumers SHOULD support Discovery.

The WoT Discovery process is designed so that nearly any client that can fetch a single TD given a single URI using any protocol (including "file") can be said to support WoT Discovery. Of course, Discoverers may support more powerful Discovery mechanisms, but some of these have additional requirements. For example, using WoT Thing Description Directories (TDDs) requires the use of HTTP, and so are only available to Discoverers that support this protocol. However, use of HTTP (and Directories) is not in fact a requirement of the WoT Discovery process. Some Introduction mechanisms can return multiple URLs, each of which can in turn be used to fetch at least one TD. So even without a TDD, it is possible to discover multiple TDs. For example, a Discoverer supporting only CoAP may want to use CoRE-RD as one of its Introduction mechanisms, and a single CoRE-RD instance can provide multiple links to individual TDs. Such a Discoverer could also support multiple Introduction mechanisms whose results are merged, such as DNS-SD and CoRE-RD.

The following assertions describe the specific responsibilities of a Discoverer:

The above process supports a way to let Directories reference other Directories without duplicating their TDs: a Directory wanting to reference other Directories should include a Thing Link with a "describedby" relation to the TD of the other Directory service. Then the above process would expand the Thing Link to obtain the actual TD of the Directory, and then (optionally) use the appropriate Directory affordance to access the contents of the linked Directory. Note that such a Thing Link points at the TD of the Directory, not at the Directory itself. These may or may not be hosted in the same location.

Recursively fetching the contents of such linked directories, especially without a specific query or filter, could easily result in downloading a large amount of data. Such recursive expansion should be limited to use cases that require it, such as inventory, auditing, or indexing.

URLs for Directory services can also be used with the federation capabilities of SPARQL queries, noted below, which in most cases will be a more efficient way to collect specific information from a set of distributed directory services. However, SPARQL requires the URL of a SPARQL endpoint for such federation, which can be found in the TDs of Directories supporting SPARQL queries. This is not the same as the URL pointing at the TD of a Directory.

6. Introduction Mechanisms

This chapter describes mechanisms for initial contact with Things or Thing Description Directories . Any of the following mechanisms may be provided by the Thing or the Thing Description Directory to Consumers. The result of an introduction mechanism is always a URL (address) of an exploration service which can be used to obtain detailed metadata (TDs) after suitable authentication. It is also possible for multiple introduction mechanisms to be used and the results merged. No particular introduction mechanism is mandatory, as long as the URL of at least one exploration service is somehow obtained.

6.1 Direct

To obtain an URL of an exploration service, any mechanism that results in a single URL MAY be used. This includes Bluetooth beacons, QR codes, and written URLs to be typed by a user. A request on all such URLs MUST result in a TD as prescribed in 7. Exploration Mechanisms . For self-describing Things, this can be the TD of the Thing itself. If the URL references a Thing Description Directory , this MUST be the Directory Description of the Thing Description Directory .

6.2 Well-Known URIs

A Thing or Thing Description Directory MAY use the Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifier [ RFC8615 ] to advertise its presence. If a Thing or Thing Description Directory use the Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifier [ RFC8615 ] to advertise its presence, it MUST register its own Thing Description into the following path: /.well-known/wot-thing-description .

When a request is made at the above Well-Known URI, the server MUST return a Thing Description as prescribed in 7. Exploration Mechanisms .

Editor's note : Registration of Well-known URI

The service name in Well-Known URI ( wot-thing-description ) is tentative. "Well-Known URIs" registry and contents of registration request is described in Section 3.1 of [ RFC8615 ].

6.3 DNS-Based Service Discovery

A Thing or Thing Description Directory MAY use DNS-Based Service Discovery (DNS-SD)[ RFC6763 ]. This can be also be used on the same local network in combination with Multicast DNS (mDNS)[ RFC6762 ].

In DNS-SD, the format of the Service Instance Name is Instance.Service.Domain . The Service part is a pair of labels following the conventions of [ RFC2782 ]. The first label has an underscore followed by the Service Name, and the second label describes the protocol.

The Service Name to indicate the Thing or Thing Description Directory MUST be _wot . The Service Name to indicate the Thing Description Directory MUST be _directory._sub._wot .

Editor's note : Service Names in existing implementations

The Service Names _wot and _directory._sub._wot are tentative. The following Service Names are used in the existing implementations: _wot , _device._sub._wot , _directory._sub._wot , _webthing , _wot-servient . To use a Service Name, registration to "Underscored and Globally Scoped DNS Node Names" Registry [ RFC8552 ] is required.

In addition, the following information MUST be included in the TXT record that is pointed to by the Service Instance Name:

td
Absolute pathname of the Thing Description of the Thing or Directory Description of the Thing Description Directory .
type
Type of the Thing Description, i.e. Thing or Directory . If omitted, the type is assumed to be Thing .

Editor's note : Usage of a TXT record in existing implementations

The following key/value pairs are used in the existing implementations:
retrieve : Absolute path name of the API to get an array of Thing Description IDs from the directory service.
register : Absolute path name of the API to register a Directory Description with the Thing Description Directory .
path : The URI of the thing description on the Web Thing's web server
td : Prefix of directory service API
tls : Value of 1 if the Web Thing supports connections via HTTPS.

Figure 2 and Figure 3 shows example sequences of discovery of Thing and Thing Description Directory using DNS-SD and mDNS.

An example sequence of discovery of Thing using DNS-SD and mDNS
Figure 2 An example sequence of discovery of Thing using DNS-SD and mDNS
An example sequence of discovery of directory service using DNS-SD and mDNS
Figure 3 An example sequence of discovery of Thing Description Directory using DNS-SD and mDNS

A Thing or Thing Description Directory MAY advertise its presence using the Constrained RESTful Environment (CoRE) Link Format [ RFC6690 ]. A Thing or Thing Description Directory MAY use the CoRE Resource Directory [ CoRE-RD ] to register a link to the Thing or Directory Description.

The resource type ( rt ) of the Link that targets the Thing Description of the Thing MUST be wot.thing . The resource type of the Link that targets the Directory Description of the Thing Description Directory MUST be wot.directory .

Editor's note

The resource types wot.thing and wot.directory are tentative. See also 11. IANA Considerations .

6.5 DID Documents

A Thing or Thing Description Directory MAY advertise its presence using the Decentralized Identifier (DID) [ DID-CORE ].

The DID Document obtained by resolving the DID of a Thing or Thing Description Directory MUST contain a Service Endpoint which points to a Thing Description describing that Thing or Thing Description Directory .

Issue 65 : Create typed links in DID Documents for WoT Directories DID

These should be consistent with a general model that we should also use for similar things, i.e. CoRE-RD and DNS-SD. We should discuss with DID the process for how to document a link type for use in DID Documents.

7. Exploration Mechanisms

This section defines the supported exploration mechanisms after providing some common background material.

7.1 Overview

Exploration mechanisms high-level class diagram
Figure 4 The high-level class diagram of the exploration mechanisms, depicting how Thing Description Servers and Thing Description Directories provide TDs . A Self-describing Thing is a special case of a Thing Description Server that is also a Thing. A Thing Description Directory acts as a Thing Description Server for each Thing Description it contains.

Figure 4 depicts the high-level information model for TD Servers (serving single TDs, including those for self-description) and Thing Description Directory services. A Thing Description Directory may contain TDs and at the same time is also a Thing, which means it has its own TD. A directory also hosts web service endpoints for retrieving individual TDs for other Things and each of these can be used as a TD Server. A Thing may in general host its own TD in which case it is a Self-Describing Thing. Self-description is not mandatory for directories, but Self-Describing Thing Description Directories are possible that are both Thing Description Directories and Self-Describing Things.

The two basic exploration mechanisms are described in 7.2 Thing Description Server and 7.3 Thing Description Directory .

7.1.1 Ontology

Ontology of TD in discovery context
Figure 5 The ontology of Thing Descriptions in the Discovery context.

Figure 5 illustrates the Discovery ontology as an extension of the Thing ontology.

The ontology includes a class for metadata that are associated with TDs stored in a directory. This class is called RegistrationInformation and described as part of the directory specification in 7.3.1.1 Registration Information .

Moreover, the Discovery ontology defines two new Thing Description classes that may be used to model special exploratory metadata:

7.1.1.1 ThingDirectory
Issue 148 : Discovery context and namespace under w3.org/ns
The type URIs used below are tentative and subject to change.
A TD which describes a Thing Description Directory instance MUST use type ThingDirectory from the discovery context or URI https://www.w3.org/2021/wot/discovery#ThingDirectory .

A TD of this class can be derived from Directory's Thing Model; see 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

7.1.2 Security Bootstrapping

The purpose of an exploration service is to serve TDs, but only after suitable authentication, and only to authorized parties. However, in some cases a Discoverer may not know what security credentials are needed to access a TD via an exploration service, particularly in ad-hoc scenarios. Since upon first access to an exploration service a Discoverer will not yet have access to the TD if suitable authentication credentials are not provided, the Discoverer can't depend on the security metadata held in TDs to know what kind of authentication and authorization information is needed. If the Discoverer has no prior knowledge, it will have to depend on existing security negotation support to bootstrap access, at least to the TD itself.

We define the following for the HTTP protocol, for which security negotiation processes already exist. However, most of the HTTP negotiation processes assume there is a human user in the loop, but this is also appropriate for WoT Discovery, since this problem will typically occur when a user is trying to access a public WoT service or perform integration of a new device. In this case the purpose of negotiation is to provide guidance on what credentials are needed to access the system.

In cases when exploration services are being used to automate system management it would be best to pre-establish what credentials (and authentication mechanisms) are needed to access the relevant exploration services and security bootstrapping would not be required. For this reason security bootstrapping is not a mandatory feature, and can be omitted or disabled on devices that are to be used with pre-established security mechanisms.

Security bootstrapping may also only be necessary on the first access to a TD. Once a Discoverer has determined what credentials and authentication mechanism are required to access a particular exploration service, they can retain this information and attempt to use them for future accesses. Note however that depending on the security scheme used, credentials themselves may expire and may need to be re-established periodically.

Security bootstrapping MAY be provided on any HTTP endpoint that serves a TD. As mentioned above, disabling or omitting security bootstrapping is permissible if security mechanisms have been previously established. For example, if an installation wants to use the OAuth2 client flow and provide potential clients with an address of an authentication server to use in advance, then security bootstrapping can be disabled, since the alternative would be to include other (and potentially weaker) forms of authentication.

In the HTTP protocol, the authentication and authorization mechanisms to be used can generally be negotiated by the HTTP server returning a "401 (Unauthorized)" response code in conjunction with a WWW-Authenticate header that specifies the information required. To gain access, the client then needs to make another request with the necessary information. There are several authentication schemes registered with IANA. However, not all of these are in wide use, some are experimental, and there is only partial overlap with the schemes supported by TDs. Also, note that the oauth scheme in the IANA registration refers to OAuth1, which is deprecated, so it should not be used. The relevant OAuth2 flow, the code flow, instead of a 401 response begins with a redirection to an authentication server, eventually resulting in credentials (bearer tokens in the case of WoT) that can be used for access.

Given these considerations, to enable security bootstrapping on a wide variety of devices as well as on browsers, the following constraints should be observed:

  • If security bootstrapping is enabled on an exploration service, after initial contact using the URL provided by an introduction mechanism, the exploration service MUST reply with either an HTTP "401 (Unauthorized)" response code or (in the case of OAuth2) with either a HTTP "302 (Found)" or "303 (See Other)" response code if appropriate authentication information has not been provided but access can be granted when it is. Note that if the exploration service does not want to provide access for some reason, or if security bootstrapping is disabled, it can ignore the request or reply with another code such as 404 or 403. Also, if no authentication is required, then the system can reply immediately with the requested TD as if authentication information were provided. Bypassing authentication however is only appropriate if the TD served as a response does not contain and cannot be used to infer Personally Identifiable Information; see 9. Privacy Considerations .
  • If security bootstrapping is enabled on an exploration service using one of the following IANA-registered HTTP Authentication Schemes: Basic, Bearer, or Digest, then a 401 HTTP response at an API endpoint intended to serve a TD MUST include a WWW-Authenticate header and any other headers describing the required authorizations. For details of the requirements, the IANA registry should be consulted for each of the above authentication schemes. If the OAuth2 code flow is used during security bootstrapping, the "302 (Found)" or "303 (See Other)" response code MUST be used for redirection to the authentication server, with access credentials eventually being represented with bearer tokens. Note that the other OAuth2 flows supported in WoT Thing Description 1.1, client and device , both expect the initial access to be to the authentication server, not the final endpoint, and so cannot be used via security bootstrapping. These requirements also apply only to endpoints of exploration services that might need to support security bootstrapping, that is those that serve TDs, not to other endpoints that might be provided by the same exploration service. In particular, these requirements apply only to URLs that can be referenced by introduction mechanisms, not to (for example) event subscription endpoints.

There are relevant Security and Privacy Considerations in [ wot-architecture11 ] and [ wot-thing-description11 ] regarding when authentication is required for access to TDs and the use of secure transport. See also 9. Privacy Considerations . In summary, secure transport (e.g. TLS) is required for public services and strongly recommended even on private networks (even if there is no authentication requirement, to protect the confidentiality of queries), and serving requests without authentication and authorization should only be considered in limited circumstances when no Personally Identifiable Information is present or can be inferred.

7.2 Thing Description Server

Any web service that can be referenced by a URL and return a TD with appropriate authentication and access controls can be used as an exploration mechanism. We will refer to this as a Thing Description Server or TD Server. A TD Server does not need to be a Thing. In particular, a TD can be hosted on an ordinary web server and referenced by its URL.

A TD Server can be used to support self-description. For self-description, a Thing hosts its own TD and makes it available via a web resource identified with a URL. Such a web resource however is not included as an affordance in the TD itself. This web resource may or may not be the same as the well-known URL used as an Introduction mechanism defined in 6.2 Well-Known URIs .

A TD Server distributing a TD using the following protocols is subject to the following constraints:

HTTP
Editor's note : Redundant

The following two assertions on TLS and authentication are redundant and not as specific as those provided elsewhere. Suggest replacing these here (and in all exploration sections) with appropriate references to security and privacy assertions given in [ wot-architecture11 ] and [ wot-thing-description11 ] and in the Security Considerations and Privacy Considerations sections of this document.

An HTTP-based TD Server providing a TD SHOULD use TLS when serving requests. An HTTP-based TD Server providing a TD SHOULD provide the resource only after performing necessary authentication and authorization.

An HTTP-based TD Server providing a TD MUST serve that resource with a GET method. A successful response from an HTTP-based TD Server providing a TD MUST have a 200 (OK) status, contain a application/td+json Content-Type header, and the TD in the body. An HTTP-based TD Server providing a TD MAY provide alternative representations through server-driven content negotiation, that is by honouring the request's Accept header and responding with the supported TD serialization and equivalent Content-Type header. An HTTP-based TD Server providing a TD MAY provide modified TDs or error responses using a different default language after server-driven content negotiation, that is by honouring the request's Accept-Language header.

An HTTP-based TD Server providing a TD MUST respond to HEAD requests by returning only the headers equivalent to those returned by a GET request to the same endpoint. This enables clients to retrieve HTTP headers such as the Content-Length in advance to know the size of the TD (in bytes) and decide on an efficient query strategy.

In constrained environments, a single TD may be too large to process for the server or clients. See 10.1 Incremental Transfer for protocol-specific recommendations on incremental transfer of the requested payload.

Error responses:

  • 401 (Unauthorized): No authentication.
  • 403 (Forbidden): Insufficient rights to the resource.

CoAP

A CoAP-based TD Server providing a TD MUST serve that resource with a GET method. A successful response from a CoAP-based TD Server providing a TD MUST have a 2.05 (Content) status, contain a Content-Format option with value 432 ( application/td+json ), and the TD in the payload. Note that the payload might be split over multiple message exchanges using block-wise transfer [ RFC7959 ]. A CoAP-based TD Server providing a TD MAY provide alternative representations through server-driven content negotiation, that is by honouring the request's Accept option and responding with the supported TD serialization and equivalent Content-Format option.

A CoAP-based TD Server providing a TD SHOULD respond to requests containing a Size2 option by including the size estimate of the TD in its next response. This is relevant when obtaining a TD using block-wise transfer and enables clients to abort the retrieval if the total payload size should be too large for them to process.

In constrained environments, a single TD may be too large to process for the server or clients. See 10.1 Incremental Transfer for protocol-specific recommendations on incremental transfer of the requested payload.

Error responses:

  • 4.01 (Unauthorized): No authentication.
  • 4.03 (Forbidden): Insufficient rights to the resource.

7.3 Thing Description Directory

A Thing Description Directory (TDD or Directory for short) is a self-describing Thing that provides a service to manage a set of TDs describing other Things.

7.3.1 Information Model

Editor's note : Directory Information Model

To Do: Formal definition of information contained in a directory and its organization.

As shown in Figure 4 , the Thing Description Directory can contain zero or more TDs . For every TD, the directory maintains additional metadata for bookkeeping and search purposes. These are described in 7.3.1.1 Registration Information and 7.3.1.3 Anonymous TD Identifiers . A TD that embeds such additional metadata as part of the interaction with the directory is called an Enriched TD .
7.3.1.1 Registration Information
The ontology of a TD in the Discovery context was introduced in Figure 5 . The RegistrationInformation class is associated with TDs that are stored in a directory. The following table lists the registration information attributes for use within TDs that embed or reference the Discovery context. Note that only an Enriched TD embeds the registration information. An Enriched TD MUST contain in its @context the URI https://w3c.github.io/wot-discovery/context/discovery-context.jsonld In this table, client refers to the producer or consumer of a TD and server refers to the Thing Description Directory .
Vocabulary term Description Client Assignment Server Assignment Type
created Provides information when the TD instance was created inside the directory.

This MAY be set by the directory and returned to consumers.

read-only optional dateTime
modified Provides information when the TD instance was last modified inside the directory.

This MAY be set by the directory and returned to consumers.

read-only optional dateTime
expires Provides the absolute time for when the TD instance registration expires.

The producer MAY set this to indicate the absolute expiry time during the registration.

For servers that support expirable TDs: If ttl (relative expiry) is present, the server MUST ignore client assignments to expires and instead compute and set it internally.

optional optional dateTime
ttl Time-to-live: relative amount of time in seconds from the registration time until when the TD instance registration expires.

The producer MAY set this to indicate the relative expiry time during the registration.

For servers that support expirable TDs: The server MUST use ttl to calculate the expires (absolute expiry) value.

optional read-only number
retrieved The time at which the TD was retrieved from the server.

This is useful for clients that intend to process other absolute timestamps but do not have an internal clock or other means of acquiring the current time.

read-only optional dateTime
7.3.1.2 Registration Expiry
Section 7.3.1.1 Registration Information introduces some attributes to specify and discover the expiry time of registered TDs .

Producers can set the expiry time to inform the directory and other consumers about the validity of the TD registrations. The expiry is also a useful indicator to inform the consumers about expiry of dynamic TDs , e.g. when changes to metadata such as geolocation or properties are expected to be valid for a limited period. Consumers may rely on the expiry time to know how long a retrieved TD will be valid and when they need to request a more recent one. Consumers who retrieve an expired TD may consider it as metadata of an inactive client.

For the servers, the expiry time is useful for implementing automatic removal of obsolete or accidental registrations. Servers SHOULD periodically purge TDs that are past their expiry times. Prescribing a global mandate or upper limit for the expiry time is application-specific and beyond the scope of this specification. The servers MAY mandate or set a configurable upper limit to expiry times and refuse incompliant requests. The purging by servers is particularly beneficial when interacting with clients (e.g. IoT devices) that are unable to explicitly deregister their TDs . This could be due to protocol-specific limitations, failure, destruction, or ungraceful decommissioning. Such clients should set a reasonably short expiry time and periodically extend it during the normal operation. The expiry can be extended by updating the registration either fully or partially, including an update that makes no changes to the TD; see 7.3.2.1.3 Update . If a client ceases to operate, a directory with purging capability will automatically remove its registration.

7.3.1.3 Anonymous TD Identifiers
The directory assigns local identifiers to Anonymous TDs to enable management and retrieval of such TDs from the directory. In situations where the server exposes an Anonymous TD (e.g. retrieval, listing, search), it MUST add the local identifier to the TD to allow local referencing. The local identifier SHOULD be a UUID Version 4, presented as a URN [ RFC4122 ]. UUID Version 4 is a random or pseudo-random number which does not carry unintended information about the host or the resource.

7.3.2 Directory Service API

Directory services provide access to System User Data and need to provide appropriate security and privacy protections. The use of secure transport protocols and access controls for authenticity and confidentiality in implementations of the WoT Directory Service API are governed by the Security Consideration and Privacy Consierations given in [ wot-architecture11 ].

The HTTP API responses must use appropriate status codes described in this section for success and error responses. The HTTP API MUST use the Problem Details [ RFC7807 ] format to carry error details in HTTP client error (4xx) and server error (5xx) responses. This enables both machines and humans to know the high-level error class and fine-grained details. All HTTP API error responses described using Problem Details MUST be encoded using UTF-8. HTTP API error responses MAY report details in different languages using proactive negotiation, if the Accept-Language header field has been set in the HTTP request [ RFC7231 ].

Issue 150 : Definition of Problem Details error types Stretch goal Discuss 2021-10 F2F

There are currently no WoT-specific error classes. In the meantime, the Problem Details error responses may omit the type field which defaults to "about:blank" and set title to the HTTP status text.

The APIs set the HTTP status codes as defined in Section 6 of [ RFC7231 ]. The list of used error codes include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • 400 (Bad Request): Invalid client input in body, query, or headers. This is accompanied by an appropriate response message.
  • 401 (Unauthorized): The request lacks valid authentication credentials. As noted in 7.1.2 Security Bootstrapping , this is the first step in authentication negotiation, needed to bootstrap secure access to TDs. Information on what credentials are required will be included in a WWW-Authenticate header.
  • 403 (Forbidden): Insufficient rights to access the resource.
  • 404 (Not Found): TD or endpoint does not exist. This is accompanied by an appropriate response message.

For each HTTP endpoint that responds to the GET method, the server MUST accept HEAD requests and return only the headers. This allows clients to retrieve headers such as the Content-Length without receiving the body and decide on a suitable strategy to query the information. For example, a constrained client can request only the necessary parts of an object (using an appropriate search query) or retrieve a list of items in small subsets.

In constrained environments, a single TD may be too large to process for the server or clients. This affects both read (i.e. retrieving one or more TDs or TD fragments) and write (i.e. submitting a TD or Partial TD) operations. See 10.1 Incremental Transfer for protocol-specific recommendations on incremental transfer of the payloads.

The directory APIs include mandatory, recommended, and optional features. Directories that don't offer recommended or optional features inform the clients about the absence of those features according to the following rules:

  • If the missing feature is to customize existing functionality of an API, the server will respond with 501 (Not Implemented) HTTP status. For example, if a client requests a list of items with a particular sorting order, the server either respects that request and returns the list with the requested order, or rejects the request and does not return the list. The server will return the list with the default order if and only if custom sorting is not requested. The normative behavior is prescribed in the respective sections.
  • If an API endpoint is not provided, the server SHOULD respond with 404 (Not Found).

A Directory server MAY provide modified TDs or error responses using a different default language after server-driven content negotiation, that is by honouring the request's Accept-Language header. The process of modifying the default language of a TD using translations already provided in a TD is described in the WoT Thing Description 1.1 specification [ wot-thing-description11 ].

7.3.2.1 Things API

The Things API is a RESTful HTTP API served at the /things endpoint providing interfaces to create, retrieve, update, delete, and list (CRUDL) TDs . The design of this API is in accordance with [ RFC7231 ] and [ REST-IOT ].

The HTTP API follows these general rules:

  • The API MUST provide the interface to list TDs. The Search API allows filtering and selection from this list; see 7.3.2.3 Search API .
  • The API MAY provide the interfaces to create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) individual TDs.
  • A directory that provides both read and write over HTTP is considered a full HTTP directory. Full HTTP directories SHOULD implement all of CRUDL (create, read, update, delete, and list) interfaces. It is practical to implement only the interfaces to read and list if the directory serves a static collection of TDs . This is also useful for directories that intend to expose only retrieval operations over HTTP, and perform other operations via out-of-band mechanisms. To expose read-only access, the directory MUST enforce access control on create, update, and delete interfaces.
  • The default serialization format for all request and success response bodies MUST be JSON, with JSON-LD 1.1 [ JSON-LD11 ] syntax to support extensions and semantic processing.
  • Directories MAY accept additional representations based on request's indicated Content-Type or Content-Encoding, and provide additional representations through server-driven content negotiation. This is useful for applications that require serializations other than JSON.

The CRUDL operations are described in the following sections:

7.3.2.1.1 Creation

Creation refers to the registration of a new TD inside the directory.

The TD object is validated in accordance with 7.3.2.1.6 Validation . Note that a TD may or may not be generated by the Thing it describes. For brownfield devices in particular a separate Discoverer process or service may be required that generates and registers a TD for a Thing on its behalf.

A TD which is identified with an id attribute MUST be handled differently with one that has no identifier ( Anonymous TD ). The create operations are elaborated below:

  • A TD that has an id MUST be submitted to the directory in the body of an HTTP PUT request at /things/{id} endpoint, where id is the unique TD identifier, present inside the TD object. An Anonymous TD is handled differently; see below. The request SHOULD contain application/td+json Content-Type header for JSON serialization of TD. The TD object is validated in accordance with 7.3.2.1.6 Validation . Upon successful processing, the server MUST respond with 201 (Created) status.

    Note: If the target location corresponds to an existing TD, the request shall instead proceed as an Update operation and respond the appropriate status code (see Update section).

    The create operation for TDs that have identifiers is specified as createThing action in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

  • An Anonymous TD MUST be submitted to the directory in the body of an HTTP POST request at /things endpoint. The request SHOULD contain application/td+json Content-Type header for JSON serialization of TD. The TD object is validated in accordance with 7.3.2.1.6 Validation . Upon successful processing, the server MUST respond with 201 (Created) status and a Location header containing a system-generated identifier for the TD. The scheme of the system-generated ID is described in 7.3.1.3 Anonymous TD Identifiers .

    The create operation for Anonymous TDs is specified as createAnonymousThing action in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

A server that supports expirable TDs will realize such functionality as described in 7.3.1.2 Registration Expiry . In particular, if ttl (relative expiry) is given during the creation, such servers will calculate and store the expires value.

Issue 48 : How to avoid duplicates in a directory Propose Closing

Registration of TDs using non-idempotent HTTP POST method enables creation of anonymous TDs (TDs without id attribute). The producer can distinguish between the created TDs using the unique-system generated IDs given in the response Location header.

A side-effect of this is that clients will be able to register duplicate TDs accidentally or on purpose.

Need to clarify:

  • What are the use cases where a duplicate TD is desired?
  • How can we mitigate accidental duplicates (deduplication)?
7.3.2.1.2 Retrieval

The retrieval of an existing TD MUST be done using an HTTP GET request at /things/{id} endpoint, where id is the unique TD identifier. A successful response MUST have 200 (OK) status, contain application/td+json Content-Type header, and the requested TD in body.

The retrieve operation is specified as retrieveThing action in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

The following is an example of a retrieved TD:

This is an Enriched TD which includes the registration information such as the creation and modification time of the TD within the directory.

The example below shows a retrieved Anonymous TD that is in Enriched TD form and has local identifier urn:uuid:48951ff3-4019-4e67-b217-dbbf011873dc .

The following is an example of a retrieved TD that was registered with a relative expiry time of 3600 seconds (one hour). The server has calculated the absolute expiry time as one hour after the modification time.

For the sake of readability, the time values in this example are set to exact numbers. In realistic settings, time values may include fractions.

7.3.2.1.3 Update

The update operations are to replace or partially modify an existing TD.

The update operations are described below:

  • A modified TD MUST replace an existing one when submitted using an HTTP PUT request at /things/{id} endpoint, where id is the identifier of the existing TD. The request SHOULD contain application/td+json Content-Type header for JSON serialization of TD. The TD object is validated in accordance with 7.3.2.1.6 Validation . Upon success, the server MUST respond with 204 (No Content) status.

    This operation is specified as updateThing property in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

    A server that supports expirable TDs will realize such functionality as described in 7.3.1.2 Registration Expiry . If ttl (relative expiry) is set during the update operation, the server will calculate and set the expires (absolute expiry) value.

    Note: If the target location does not correspond to an existing TD, the request shall instead proceed as a Create operation and respond the appropriate status code (see Create section). In other words, an HTTP PUT request acts as a create or update operation.

  • An existing TD MUST be partially modified when the modified parts are submitted using an HTTP PATCH request at /things/{id} endpoint, where id is the identifier of the existing TD. The partial update MUST be processed using the JSON merge patch format described in [ RFC7396 ]. The request MUST contain application/merge-patch+json Content-Type header for JSON serialization of the merge patch document. The input MUST be in Partial TD form and conform to the original TD structure. If the input contains members that appear in the original TD, their values are replaced. If a member does not appear in the original TD, that member is added. If the member is set to null but appear in the original TD, that member is removed. Members with object values are processed recursively. After applying the modifications, the TD object is validated in accordance with 7.3.2.1.6 Validation . Upon success, the server MUST respond with a 204 (No Content) status.

    This operation is specified as partiallyUpdateThing property in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

    A server that supports expirable TDs will realize such functionality as described in 7.3.1.2 Registration Expiry . During the partial update operation, if the resulting TD has ttl (relative expiry), the server will calculate and set a new expires (absolute expiry) value.

    A patch operation is particularly useful to efficiently extend the expiry of a registration that uses a ttl (relative expiry) value. This is typically done by submitting an empty merge patch document, i.e. an empty JSON object. This effectively translates to performing a partial update operation that updates nothing, but triggers the recalculation of expires (absolute expiry) value. This expiry functionality only works if the server supports it as defined in 7.3.1.2 Registration Expiry .

    The following example is a merge patch document to update only the base and registration expires fields of a TD:

7.3.2.1.4 Deletion

A delete operation MUST be done using an HTTP DELETE request at /things/{id} , where id is the identifier of the existing TD. A successful response MUST have 204 (No Content) status. The retrieve operation is specified as deleteThing property in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

7.3.2.1.5 Listing

The listing endpoint provides different ways to query the collection of full TD objects from the directory.

In many scenarios, retrieving parts instead of full TD objects is preferred because only a subset of elements are needed (e.g. id and href of a property for all TDs) and to save networking resources. The Search API allows querying parts of TD objects; see 7.3.2.3 Search API .

The directory MUST allow retrieval of existing TDs using HTTP GET requests at the /things endpoint. A successful response MUST have 200 (OK) status, contain application/ld+json Content-Type header, and an array of TDs in the body.

There may be scenarios in which clients need to retrieve the collection in small subsets of TDs. While the Search API ( 7.3.2.3 Search API ) does offer the ability to query a specific range, it may not be optimal, nor developer-friendly. The server MAY support pagination to return the collection in small subsets. The pagination must be based on the following rules:

  • When the limit query parameter is set to a positive integer, the server MAY respond with a subset of TDs totalling to less than or equal to the requested number.
  • When there are more TDs after a returned subset of the collection, the response MUST contain a next Link header [ RFC8288 ] with the URL of the next subset. The next link MUST include all arguments needed to produce the same set of data and its ordering, in particular the same limit argument given on the initial request as well as a zero-based offset argument anchored at the beginning of the next subset. The link MUST be absolute or relative to directory API's base URL. Moreover, it may include additional arguments that are necessary for ordering or session management.
  • All paged responses MUST contain a canonical Link header [ RFC8288 ] pointing to the collection and include an etag parameter to represent the current state of the collection. The link may be absolute or relative to directory API's base URL. The etag value could be a revision number, timestamp, or UUID Version 4, set whenever the TD collection changes in a way that affects the ordering of the TDs. The clients may rely on the etag value to know whether the collection remains consistent across paginated retrieval of the collection. For example, creation or deletion of TDs or update of TD fields used for ordering may make shift the calculated paging window.
  • By default, the collection MUST be sorted using UTF-8 lexicographical order by the unique identifier of TDs. The server MAY support sorting by other TD attributes using query arguments: sort_by to select a field (e.g. created ) and sort_order to choose the order (i.e. asc or desc for ascending and descending ordering). A server MUST reject requests to sort on fields that do not have values that are orderable basic types, with a 400 (Bad Request) status. If the server does not support custom sorting, it MUST reject the request with 501 (Not Implemented) status. If sorting attributes are accepted, they MUST be added consistently to all next links. Sorting order MUST always be defined using lexicographical ordering on a UTF-8 encoding of the relevant fields.

This above specification follows a subset of Linked Data Paging [ LDP-Paging ] to allow optional pagination of the JSON-LD array. Additional parts of Linked Data Paging may be implemented for examples to honour client's query preference or to add other link relations for semantic annotation and alternative navigation links.

The following example provides a walk-through of the paginated retrieval of TDs:

As an alternative to an array of TDs as the body of the response, the server MAY send a more verbose payload allowing server-side information, such as pagination information, to be included in addition to the actual data.

The alternative pagination format is derived from Hydra Advanced Concepts , more concretely the Partial Collection View . Adapted to our purposes and using the members field to accomodate the array of TDs, it looks as follows for the listing endpoint:

To tell the server which format to send, the additional query parameter ?format=array|collection can be added to the request. ?format=array is the default parameter, does not have to be provided explicitly, and yields to a server response of the pure array of TDs. ?format=collection should yield to a server response with the format as described in Example 8 .

The listing operation is specified as things property in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) .

7.3.2.1.6 Validation

The syntactic validation of TD objects before storage is RECOMMENDED to prevent common erroneous submissions. The server MAY use Thing Description JSON Schema to validate standard TD vocabulary, or a more comprehensive JSON Schema to also validate extensions.

Additional forms of validation can be added to support various use cases. For example, a use case may require stateful validation of the input TDs to ensure that the version value is initialized and updated according to pre-defined rules.

If the server fails to validate the TD object, it MUST inform the client with necessary details to identify and resolve the errors. The validation error MUST be described as Problem Details [ RFC7807 ] with an extension field called validationErrors , set to an array of objects with field and description fields. This is necessary to represent the error in a machine-readable way. All validation error responses described using Problem Details MUST be encoded using UTF-8. Validation error responses MAY report details in different languages using proactive negotiation, if the Accept-Language header field has been set in the HTTP request [ RFC7231 ].

Example 9 is an example error response with two validation errors.
Issue 99 : Define requirements and add section for validation

How much validation does a directory need to do?

  1. If it only supports syntactic queries, is JSONSchema validation sufficient? Do we also use SHACL?
  2. If we support SPARQL, do we need to do more to make sure the ontologies used are correct?
  3. Is there a subset of TD assertions we should check?
7.3.2.2 Events API

The Notification API is to notify clients about the changes to TDs maintained within the directory. Directories MAY implement the Notification API.

The Notification API MUST follow the Server-Sent Events (SSE) [ EVENTSOURCE ] specifications to serve events to clients at /events endpoint. In particular, the server responds to successful requests with 200 (OK) status and text/event-stream Content Type. Re-connecting clients may continue from the last event by providing the last event ID as Last-Event-ID header value. The server SHOULD provide an event ID as the id field in each event and respond to re-connecting clients by delivering all missed events.

The rest of this section describes the implementation details on top of the SSE protocol. Realizing the notification functionality using other protocols such as MQTT are possible and may be formalized in future versions of this specification.

Event Types
The server MUST produce events attributed to the lifecycle of the Thing Descriptions within the directory using thing_created , thing_updated , and thing_deleted event types.
Event Filtering
The API enables server-side filtering of events to reduce resource consumption by delivering only the events required by clients. Client libraries may offer additional filtering capabilities on the client-side.

The server MUST support event filtering based on the event type given by the client upon subscription.

For example, given the URI Template /events{/type} :

  • /events/thing_created instructs the server to only deliver events of type thing_created
  • /events instructs the server to deliver all events
The clients need to subscribe separately to receive a subset of the events (e.g. only thing_created and thing_deleted ) from the server. When using HTTP/2, multiple subscriptions on the same domain (HTTP streams) get multiplexed on a single connection.

Event filtering based on the payload is work in progress.
Event Data
The event data MUST contain the JSON serialization of the event object. The event data object is a Partial TD or the whole TD object depending on the request:
  • The event data object MUST at least include the identifier of the TD created, updated, or deleted at that event in Partial TD form.
  • When diff query parameter is set to true and the event has thing_created type, the server MAY return the whole TD object as event data.
  • When diff query parameter is set to true and the event has thing_updated type, the server MAY inform the client about the updated parts following the JSON Merge Patch [ RFC7396 ] format. A thing_updated event data that is based on JSON Merge Patch [ RFC7396 ] MUST always include the identifier of the TD regardless of whether it is changed.

    The following example shows the event triggered on update of the TD from Example 11 :

  • The diff query parameter MUST be ignored for thing_deleted events. In other words, the server shall not include additional properties in the payload of thing_deleted events when diff is set to true .
  • When a server which does not support the diff query parameter is requested with such query parameter, it MUST reject the request with 501 (Not Implemented) status. This is to inform the clients about the lack of such functionality at the connection time to avoid runtime exceptions caused by missing event data attributes.

The Notification API is specified as three event affordances in 7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model) , namely: thingCreated , thingUpdated , and thingDeleted .

Editor's note : SSE Authorization Header

Some early SSE implementations (including HTML5 EventSource) do not allow setting custom headers in the initial HTTP request. Authorization header is required in few OAuth2 flows and passing it as a query parameter is not advised . There are polyfills for browsers and modern libraries which allow setting Authorization header.

7.3.2.4 API Specification (Thing Model)
Issue 86 : "Thing description" for Directory should be a "Thing Model" Resolve prior to WD update

To do: add a Thing Model ( directory.tm.json ) that can derive to this TD as an example. The TM should describe all interaction affordances and indicate which ones are required (i.e. mandatory by this spec). Moreover, it should use placeholders for deployment-specific attributes. Informative affordances (JSONPath and XPath) should be defined as such.

The API of the directory is specified as a Thing Model . The Thing Model alone should not be considered as the reference to implement or interact with a directory. The full specification is available as human-readable text in 7.3.2 Directory Service API . 
                        
Cannot GET /uploads/oFOZWJ/directory.tm.json

Cannot GET /uploads/SnKAZN/directory.tm.json
Issue 82 : Creation of OpenAPI spec from Directory TD

Need to confirm if equivalent OpenAPI spec can be easily created out of the TM. If yes, a sentence may be added indicating this possibility.

Editor's note : Context URIs

The context URIs are tentative and subject to change.

8. Security Considerations

Security is a cross-cutting issue that needs to be considered in all WoT building blocks and WoT implementations. This chapter summarizes some general issues and guidelines to help preserve the security of concrete WoT discovery implementations. For a more detailed and complete analysis of both security and privacy issues, see the WoT Security and Privacy Guidelines specification [ WOT-SECURITY ]. WoT Thing and WoT TDDs are also web services and should be implemented using best practices for web services. In addition to the specific security considerations below, the security risks and mitigations discussed in guides such as the OWASP Top 10 [ OWASP-Top-10 ] should be evaluated, and if applicable, addressed.

8.1 Denial of Service

Certain functions of the directory service, in particular search queries, may require significant resources to execute and this fact can be used to launch denial of service (DoS) attacks against WoT Thing Description Directory services. In such an attack a WoT Directory would be overloaded by requests from the attacker and unable to service other requests.

Mitigations:
  • A WoT Thing Description Directory implementation SHOULD limit the number of queries per unit time from the same requestor.
  • A WoT Thing Description Directory implementation SHOULD limit the complexity of queries (for example, the total length of the query expression or its depth).
  • A WoT Thing Description Directory implementation SHOULD use a watchdog timer to abort queries that take more than a certain maximum (implementation-configurable) amount of time.

8.2 Amplification and Distributed Denial of Service

It may also be possible to use elements of WoT Discovery mechanisms to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against other targets. In such an attack the WoT Discovery service itself is not the target. Instead, an aspect of the WoT Discovery service would be exploited to generate amplified network traffic that overloads a third party, the actual target. Such an attack has two requirements: first, the ability to redirect traffic to a third party, and second, an intermediary service that can be exploited to amplify network traffic from the attacker. Redirection of network traffic is possible in some protocols, such as unsecured CoAP, by modifying source information in headers. Amplification is possible by taking advantage of three multiplicative factors: the ratio of request to response payload sizes, use of "observe" in protocols like CoAP (which can give multiple results for one request), and use of multicast (which can allow multiple servers to respond to one request). Services which do not support authentication are ideal intermediaries for such an indirect attack. Unfortunately, the Introduction mechanisms for WoT Discovery are meant to provide open access mechanisms to initiate discovery and might be exploited for this purpose.

Mitigations:
  • Open implementations of Introduction mechanisms SHOULD NOT support observe or similar extended result subprotocols.
  • Open implementations of Introduction mechanisms SHOULD NOT respond to multicast requests unless this is absolutely required by the protocol. If support for multicast is required, in the case of CoAP, the recommendations made in [ RFC9175 ] SHOULD be applied. Note however that in the case of discovery the number of servers that might respond to a multicast request will generally not be known in advance, in which case the mitigations proposed in [ RFC9175 ] may not be effective.
  • Limit the size of responses to the minimum. The total size of responses to an Introduction SHOULD be less than 3x the size of the total size of request, and this should include any error responses. This is consistent with DDOS mitigations in [ RFC9000 ] (QUIC) and HTTP/3. Here "total size" includes any headers required by the protocol itself.
  • Introductions SHOULD rate-limit responses to any particular request source.
  • Introduction mechanisms on a segmented network behind a firewall (e.g. a LAN) SHOULD NOT respond to requests that are (apparently) from outside that LAN.
Of particular concern are Introduction mechanisms that can return multiple results, such as CoRE-RD and DID. It may be necessary to use authentication/authorization on such Introduction mechanisms as well if the other mitigations above are not sufficient. A recommended alternative is to move multiple results from such Introductions into a WoT TDD, which can then be protected by appropriate authentication and authorization measures. Then the open Introduction mechanism only has to return one result, the URL of the TDD. Introduction mechanisms that are visible on the open internet should be especially careful to implement the above mitigations, and perhaps avoid Introduction mechanisms that can return multiple URLs completely.

8.3 Self-Discovery on LANs

On a LAN, certificates and browsers may not be able to property set up TLS for HTTPS because browsers expect certificates pointing to a publicly-visible URL. Using HTTP is common practice inside LANs but in combination with self-description it means that WoT Things would be essentially be making TDs visible to everyone with access to the private LAN. Even if security mechanisms such as HTTP passwords were used, these are not effective (they can be easily discovered by a traffic analyser) without transport security.

Mitigations:

PSK (pre-shared keys) SHOULD be used if possible on LANs, meaning one of the ciphersuites in [ RFC4279 ]. This does require that Things are assigned PSKs in a common security domain, which is typically done by following an onboarding process. Unfortunately, specific onboarding processes are currently out of scope of the WoT specifications.

An alternative is to depend on local network security (i.e. WEP). This is not the best solution from a security or privacy point of view but may be acceptable in some contexts. Note however that all users with access to the network would in turn have access to all TDs via self-description. If Things cannot be individually secured with transport security and authentication and authorization, a separate network SHOULD be set up, i.e. with an alternative SSID, and used only for IoT devices. Using a segmented network reduces the need for distributing the password to this network to those who need access to the set of IoT devices connected to it.

Another alternative is to use a reverse proxy service based in the cloud. Secure setup can be accomplished if the IoT device has access to the cloud, since the proxy server can have a public URL and the initial connection can use HTTPS, then open a secure tunnel over a websocket. The proxy can in turn re-expose a secure endpoint, and possible add authentication. The disadvantages of this approach including depending on an external cloud service and the need to expose an external access point (which is itself a security risk). The first disadvantage can be addressed by hosting the proxy service locally and exposing a public URL using e.g. dynamic DNS if the local server is connected through an ISP. If Things cannot be individually secured with transport security and authentication and authorization, then they MAY be made available for general access via a proxy that can provide suitable access controls.

9. Privacy Considerations

Privacy is a cross-cutting issue that needs to be considered in all WoT building blocks and WoT implementations. This chapter summarizes some general issues and guidelines to help preserve the privacy of concrete WoT discovery implementations. For a more detailed and complete analysis of both security and privacy issues, see the WoT Security and Privacy Guidelines specification [ WOT-SECURITY ].

The WoT discovery architecture is designed to avoid a dependence on the privacy of existing discovery schemes by using a two-phase approach and allowing for the enforcement of authorization before metadata release. However several privacy risks still exist. These are listed below along with possible mitigations. The level of risk to privacy in particular depends on the use case and whether there is a risk that information related to a person might be distributed in a fashion inconsistent with the privacy desires of that person. For privacy we distinguish the following broad classes of use case scenarios:

Institutional
Both the Things producing metadata and the Consumers of that metadata are owned and controlled by an institution or representatives of an institution. Example: Automation in a factory where a control system is accessing the state of an assembly line in order to evaluate quality.
Service
The Things producing metadata are owned and controlled by an institution or representatives of an institution while the consumers are individuals. Example: driver of an electric vehicle accessing the TD for a charge station in order to check status of a charge.
Personal
Both the Things producing metadata and the Consumers of that metadata are owned and controlled by the same individual. Example: A smart home control system for charging an electric car from home-attached solar panels, both home and car owned by the same person.
Personal Peer-to-Peer
The Things producing metadata and the Consumers of that metadata are owned and controlled by different individuals. Example: A smart home control system for charging a guest's electric car from home-attached solar panels.
Institutional Peer-to-Peer
The Things producing metadata and the Consumers of that metadata are owned and controlled by different institutions. Example: A utility provides and manages power delivered to a factory, and the factory provides an interface for the utility to negotiate on-demand power usage reductions.
Client
The Things producing metadata are owned and controlled by an individual while the consumers are an institution or representatives of an institution. Example: A personal electric vehicle exposes an interface to a public charging station so that the charging station can evaluate the charge status of the vehicle.

All of these in fact carry privacy risks. Even in the case of factory automation, there is the chance that data about employee performance would be captured and would have to be managed appropriately.

With these categories established, we will now discuss some specific privacy risks and potential mitigations.

9.1 Location Tracking

A discovery service may potentially allow the approximate location of a person to be determined without their consent. This risk occurs in some specific circumstances which can be avoided or mitigated. It is also similar to the risk posed by other network services such as DHCP and DNS.

For this risk to occur, there first has to be an IoT device that can be reliably associated with a person's location, such as a necessary medical device or a vehicle. Note that the risk only applies to personal use cases, not institutional ones. Secondly, the device has to be configured to register automatically with the nearest directory service. In this case, the location of the device can be inferred from the network range of the directory service and the location of the person inferred from the location of the device.

There are a few variants of this:

Some of these risks are shared by similar services. For example, DCHP automatically responds to requests for IP addresses on a local network, and devices typically provide an identifier (a MAC address) as part of this process, and the DHCP server maintains a registry. In theory, someone with access to the DHCP server in, say, a cafe, could use this information to track someone's phone and infer their location.

Mitigations:
There are a few options to mitigate this risk:
  • To avoid location tracking, a WoT Thing MAY disable registration with public directories. Registration would still be possible with personal directories, for example, a home gateway, but a user could disable registration at other locations. This has the disadvantage that functionality is lost: personal devices cannot be discovered in public locations. This could be addressed by having internet-accessible private discovery services. For example, the user's home gateway could provide an internet-accessible service, but with access control limiting use to authorized users.
  • To avoid location tracking, a WoT Thing MAY use Anonymous TDs. In some cases, it may be possible to use anonymous TDs and omit explicit IDs from TDs submitted to a TDD. In this case the TDD will generate a local ID valid only in that TDD. This does, however, complicate update since the client needs to remember the local ID assigned by the TDD. Anonymous TDs also do not prevent tracking by other means, such as fingerprinting.
  • To avoid location tracking, a WoT Thing MAY periodically generate new IDs. Using fixed IDs makes it exceptionally easy to track devices. This problem also occurs in DHCP with MAC address and there is a similar partial mitigation: generate new random IDs periodically. There are however, a few issues. First of all, other identification information in the TD needs to be hidden. For example, client IDs issued by CSPs for API security should be omitted from TDs if they cannot be easily changed. Second, if the device generates a new ID, the user may still need to know the current ID to find the device via discovery. This can be accomplished however by generating new IDs using a deterministic cryptographic generator that is a function of the current time. However, note that regenerating IDs alone does not make tracking impossible since a TD might be fingerprinted. Also, updating an ID might be observable to the owner of the directory service, who could track and record the updated ID. Even if the TD is deleted and reinserted the association could be inferred. This is however exactly parallel to the situation with DHCP and rotation of MAC addresses. In general, however, generating new IDs at least for each service or person to which a TD is supplied makes it harder to connect registration events at different locations and times. There is a related issue with long-lived IP addresses which might need to be updated periodically to mitigate tracking. In the context of ipv6 [ RFC8981 ] discusses this.
  • To reduce the risk of negative location inferencing, access to private directories SHOULD be limited by using access controls. If an attacker cannot access the service, they cannot retrieve information to infer location. Access rights provided to guests (e.g. for Peer-to-Peer Personal scenarios) should be appropriately time-limited. Use of long time-to-live values may be appropriate in other cases. In addition, TDs should be updated in a directory only when they change. For example, the TD for a car may only be updated when new car firmware is available providing new services, and the time-to-live might be set at one month (covering most absences).
  • When explicit location information is available, whether stored in a TD or available in a property, additional care SHOULD be taken to only share the TD and/or access to the device with trusted partners, including directories. If the TD must be shared with a public directory, the location information MAY be stripped.

9.2 Query Tracking

A directory service could potentially record and track queries by an individual, identifying that individual by their authenticated identity provided. Then the set of queries associated with an individual could be used to profile that individual, and specific queries may also reveal personal information about an individual.

Mitigations:
When accessing a public directory, like any other public web service, users and implementations SHOULD use an anonymous identity provider. In particular, OAuth2 can provide tokens which don't identify specific individuals, they just assert access rights proven elsewhere.

10. Performance Considerations

This section is non-normative.

10.1 Incremental Transfer

TD objects are not constrained in size. They may become expensive to process and transfer individually or collectively. A single TD or a list of TDs could be too large for a constrained device, serving its own TD to consumers, submitting it to a directory, or consuming other TDs. To meet such requirements, servers should support incremental transfer of payloads using protocol-specific mechanisms:

Most HTTP servers and clients automatically process the data that is transferred in chunks. Memory-constrained clients should consider consuming the received data incrementally, instead of trying to load a whole object in memory for de-serialization.

11. IANA Considerations

11.1 Well-Known URI Registration

IANA will be asked to allocate the following value into the Well-Known URI defined in [ RFC8615 ].

Editor's note : Shorter suffix

We are currently discussing whether we should adopt a shorter URI suffix (such as wot-td ) in view of limited packet lengths for some protocols.

11.2 Service Name Registration

IANA will be asked to allocate the following value into Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry defined in [ RFC6335 ].

11.3 CoRE Resource Types Registration

IANA will be asked to allocate the following values into the Resource Type ( rt= ) Link Target Attribute Values sub-registry of the Constrained Restful Environments (CoRE) Parameters registry defined in [ RFC6690 ].

Value Description Reference
wot.thing Thing Description of a Thing 6.4 CoRE Link Format and CoRE Resource Directory
wot.directory Directory Description of a Thing Description Directory 6.4 CoRE Link Format and CoRE Resource Directory

A. Recent Specification Changes

A.1 Changes from First Draft

B. Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the W3C staff and all other active Participants of the W3C Web of Things Interest Group (WoT IG) and Working Group (WoT WG) for their support, technical input and suggestions that led to improvements to this document.

C. References

C.1 Normative references

[CoRE-RD]
CoRE Resource Directory . Christian Amsüss; Zach Shelby; Michael Koster; Carsten Bormann; Peter van der Stok. IETF. 2 November 2020. URL: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-core-resource-directory-26
[DID-CORE]
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 . Manu Sporny; Amy Guy; Markus Sabadello; Drummond Reed. W3C. 3 August 2021. W3C Proposed Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
[EVENTSOURCE]
Server-Sent Events . Ian Hickson. W3C. 28 January 2021. W3C Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/
[JSON-LD11]
JSON-LD 1.1 . Gregg Kellogg; Pierre-Antoine Champin; Dave Longley. W3C. 16 July 2020. W3C Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/
[OWASP-Top-10]
OWASP Top Ten . OWASP. URL: https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten
[RFC2119]
Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels . S. Bradner. IETF. March 1997. Best Current Practice. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119
[RFC2782]
A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV) . A. Gulbrandsen; P. Vixie; L. Esibov. IETF. February 2000. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2782
[RFC4122]
A Universally Unique IDentifier (UUID) URN Namespace . P. Leach; M. Mealling; R. Salz. IETF. July 2005. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4122
[RFC4279]
Pre-Shared Key Ciphersuites for Transport Layer Security (TLS) . P. Eronen, Ed.; H. Tschofenig, Ed.. IETF. December 2005. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4279
[RFC6335]
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Procedures for the Management of the Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry . M. Cotton; L. Eggert; J. Touch; M. Westerlund; S. Cheshire. IETF. August 2011. Best Current Practice. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6335
[RFC6690]
Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) Link Format . Z. Shelby. IETF. August 2012. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6690
[RFC6762]
Multicast DNS . S. Cheshire; M. Krochmal. IETF. February 2013. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6762
[RFC6763]
DNS-Based Service Discovery . S. Cheshire; M. Krochmal. IETF. February 2013. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6763
[RFC7231]
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content . R. Fielding, Ed.; J. Reschke, Ed.. IETF. June 2014. Proposed Standard. URL: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc7231.html
[RFC7396]
JSON Merge Patch . P. Hoffman; J. Snell. IETF. October 2014. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7396
[RFC7807]
Problem Details for HTTP APIs . M. Nottingham; E. Wilde. IETF. March 2016. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7807
[RFC7959]
Block-Wise Transfers in the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) . C. Bormann; Z. Shelby, Ed.. IETF. August 2016. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7959
[RFC8174]
Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words . B. Leiba. IETF. May 2017. Best Current Practice. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174
[RFC8288]
Web Linking . M. Nottingham. IETF. October 2017. Proposed Standard. URL: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc8288.html
[RFC8615]
Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) . M. Nottingham. IETF. May 2019. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8615
[RFC8981]
Temporary Address Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6 . F. Gont; S. Krishnan; T. Narten; R. Draves. IETF. February 2021. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8981
[RFC9000]
QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed and Secure Transport . J. Iyengar, Ed.; M. Thomson, Ed.. IETF. May 2021. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9000
[RFC9175]
Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP): Echo, Request-Tag, and Token Processing . C. Amsüss; J. Preuß Mattsson; G. Selander. IETF. February 2022. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9175
[SPARQL11-OVERVIEW]
SPARQL 1.1 Overview . The W3C SPARQL Working Group. W3C. 21 March 2013. W3C Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-overview/
[wot-architecture11]
Web of Things (WoT) Architecture 1.1 . Michael Lagally; Ryuichi Matsukura; Toru Kawaguchi; Kunihiko Toumura; Kazuo Kajimoto. W3C. 24 November 2020. W3C Working Draft. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-architecture11/
[wot-thing-description11]
Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description 1.1 . Sebastian Käbisch; Takuki Kamiya; Michael McCool; Victor Charpenay. W3C. 11 March 2022. W3C Working Draft. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description11/
[wot-usecases]
Web of Things (WoT): Use Cases . Michael Lagally; Michael McCool; Ryuichi Matsukura; Tomoaki Mizushima. W3C. 15 October 2020. Editor's Draft. URL: https://w3c.github.io/wot-usecases/
[xpath-31]
XML Path Language (XPath) 3.1 . Jonathan Robie; Michael Dyck; Josh Spiegel. W3C. 21 March 2017. W3C Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-31/

C.2 Informative references

[JSONPATH]
JSONPath: Query expressions for JSON . Stefan Gössner; Glyn Normington; Carsten Bormann. IETF. DRAFT. URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-jsonpath-base
[LDP-Paging]
Linked Data Platform Paging 1.0 . Steve Speicher; John Arwe; Ashok Malhotra. W3C. 30 June 2015. W3C Working Group Note. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp-paging/
[REST-IOT]
RESTful Design for Internet of Things Systems . Ari Keranen; Matthias Kovatsch; Klaus Hartke. IETF. 11 May 2020. URL: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-t2trg-rest-iot-06
[RFC7230]
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing . R. Fielding, Ed.; J. Reschke, Ed.. IETF. June 2014. Proposed Standard. URL: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc7230.html
[RFC7540]
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2) . M. Belshe; R. Peon; M. Thomson, Ed.. IETF. May 2015. Proposed Standard. URL: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc7540.html
[RFC8323]
CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) over TCP, TLS, and WebSockets . C. Bormann; S. Lemay; H. Tschofenig; K. Hartke; B. Silverajan; B. Raymor, Ed.. IETF. February 2018. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8323
[RFC8552]
Scoped Interpretation of DNS Resource Records through "Underscored" Naming of Attribute Leaves . D. Crocker. IETF. March 2019. Best Current Practice. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8552
[WOT-SECURITY]
Web of Things (WoT) Security and Privacy Guidelines . Elena Reshetova; Michael McCool. W3C. 6 November 2019. W3C Working Group Note. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-security/