BIP 0070

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Revision as of 01:55, 31 July 2013 by Gavinandresen (talk | contribs) (Motivation)
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This page describes a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal).
Please see BIP 2 for more information about BIPs and creating them. Please do not just create a wiki page.

  BIP: 70
  Title: Payment Protocol
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 29-07-2013

Abstract

This BIP describes a protocol for communication between a merchant and their customer, enabling both a better customer experience and better security against man-in-the-middle attacks on the payment process.

Motivation

The current, minimal Bitcoin payment protocol operates as follows:

  1. Customer adds items to an online shopping basket, and decides to pay using Bitcoin.
  2. Merchant generates a unique payment address, associates it with the customer's order, and asks the customer to pay.
  3. Customer copies the Bitcoin address from the merchant's web page and pastes it into whatever wallet they are using OR follows a bitcoin: link and their wallet is launched with the amount to be paid.
  4. Customer authorizes payment to the merchant's address and broadcasts the transaction through the Bitcoin p2p network.
  5. Merchant's server detects payment and after sufficient transaction confirmations considers the transaction final.

This BIP extends the above protocol to support several new features:

  1. Human-readable, secure payment destinations-- customers will be asked to authorize payment to "website.com" instead of an inscrutable, 34-character bitcoin address.
  2. Secure proof of payment, which the customer can use in case of a dispute with the merchant.
  3. Payment received messages, so the customer knows immediately that the merchant has received, and has processed (or is processing) their payment.
  4. Refund addresses, automatically given to the merchant by the customer's wallet software, so merchants do not have to contact customers before refunding overpayments or orders that cannot be fulfilled for some reason.

Protocol

This BIP describes payment protocol messages encoded using Google's Protocol Buffers, authenticated using X.509 certificates, and communicated over http/https. Future BIPs might extend this payment protocol to other encodings, PKI systems, or transport protocols.

The payment protocol consists of three messages; PaymentRequest, Payment, and PaymentACK, and begins with the customer somehow indicating that they are ready to pay and the merchant's server responding with a PaymentRequest message:

Protocol Sequence.png

Messages

Output

Outputs are used in PaymentRequest messages to specify where a payment (or part of a payment) should be sent. They are also used in Payment messages to specify where refund should be sent.

    message Output {
	optional uint64 amount = 1 [default = 0];
        optional bytes script = 2;
    }
amount Number of satoshis (0.00000001 BTC) to be paid
script a "TxOut" script where payment should be sent. This will normally

be one of the standard Bitcoin transaction scripts (e.g. pubkey OP_CHECKSIG). This is optional to enable future extensions to this protocol that derive Outputs from a master public key and the PaymentRequest data itself.

PaymentDetails/PaymentRequest

Payment requests are split into two messages to support future extensibility. The bulk of the information is contained in the PaymentDetails message. It is wrapped inside a PaymentRequest message, which contains meta-information about the merchant and a digital signature.

    message PaymentDetails {
        optional string network = 1 [default = "main"];
        repeated Output outputs = 2;
        required uint64 time = 3;
        optional uint64 expires = 4;
        optional string memo = 5;
        optional string payment_url = 6;
        optional bytes merchant_data = 7;
    }        
network either "main" for payments on the production Bitcoin

network, or "test" for payments on test network. If a client receives a PaymentRequest for a network it does not support it must reject the request.

outputs one or more outputs where Bitcoins are to be sent. If the

sum of outputs.amount is zero, the customer will be asked how much to pay, and the bitcoin client may choose any or all of the Outputs (if there are more than one) for payment. If the sum of outputs.amount is non-zero, then the customer will be asked to pay the sum, and the payment shall be split among the Outputs with non-zero amounts (if there are more than one; Outputs with zero amounts shall be ignored).

time Unix timestamp (seconds since 1-Jan-1970) when the

PaymentRequest was created.

expires Unix timestamp after which the PaymentRequest should be

considered invalid.

memo UTF-8 encoded, plain-text (no formatting) note that should be

displayed to the customer, explaining what this PaymentRequest is for.

payment_url Secure (usually https) location where a Payment

message (see below) may be sent to obtain a PaymentACK.

merchant_data Arbitrary data that may be used by the merchant to

identify the PaymentRequest. May be omitted if the merchant does not need to associate Payments with PaymentRequest or if they associate each PaymentRequest with a separate payment address.

A PaymentRequest is PaymentDetails optionally tied to a merchant's identity:

    message PaymentRequest {
        optional uint32 payment_details_version = 1 [default = 1];
        optional string pki_type = 2 [default = "none"];
        optional bytes pki_data = 3;
        required bytes serialized_payment_details = 4;
        optional bytes signature = 5;
    }
payment_details_version See below for a discussion of versioning/upgrading.
pki_type public-key infrastructure (PKI) system being used to

identify the merchant. All implementation should support "none", "x509+sha256" and "x509+sha1".

pki_data PKI-system data that identifies the merchant and can be

used to create a digital signature. In the case of X.509 certificates, pki_data one or more X.509 certificates (see Certificates section below).

serialized_payment_details A protocol-buffer serialized

PaymentDetails message.

signature digital signature over a hash of the protocol buffer

serialized variation of the PaymentRequest message, where signature is a zero-byte array and fields are serialized in numerical order (all current protocol buffer implementations serialize fields in numerical order), using the public key in pki_data.

When a Bitcoin wallet application receives a PaymentRequest, it must authorize payment by doing the following:

  1. Validate the merchant's identity and signature using the PKI system, if the pki_type is not "none".
  2. Validate that the time on the customer's system is before PaymentDetails.expires. If it is not, then the payment request

must be rejected.

  1. Display the merchant's identity and ask the customer if they would like to submit payment (e.g. display the "Common Name" in the first X.509 certificate).

PaymentRequest messages larger than 50,000 bytes should be rejected by the merchant's server, to mitigate denial-of-service attacks.

Payment

Payment messages are sent after the customer has authorized payment:

    message Payment {
        optional bytes merchant_data = 1;
        repeated bytes transactions = 2;
        repeated Output refund_to = 3;
        optional string memo = 4;
    }
merchant_data copied from PaymentDetails.merchant_data. Merchants

may use invoice numbers or any other data they require to match Payments to PaymentRequests.

transactions One or more valid, signed Bitcoin transactions that

fully pay the PaymentRequest

refund_to One or more outputs where the merchant may return

funds, if necessary.

memo UTF-8 encoded, plain-text note from the customer to the

merchant.

If the customer authorizes payment, then the Bitcoin client:

  1. Creates and signs one or more transactions that satisfy (pay in full) PaymentDetails.outputs
  2. Broadcast the transactions on the Bitcoin p2p network.
  3. If PaymentDetails.payment_url is specified, POST a Payment message to that URL. The Payment message is serialized and sent as the body of the POST request.

Errors communicating with the payment_url server should be communicated to the user.

PaymentDetails.payment_url must be secure against man-in-the-middle attacks that might alter Payment.refund_to (if using HTTP, it must be TLS-protected).

When the merchant's server receives the Payment message, it must determine whether or not the transactions satisfy conditions of payment. If and only if they do, if should broadcast the transaction(s) on the Bitcoin p2p network.

PaymentACK

PaymentACK is the final message in the payment protocol; it is sent from the merchant's server to the bitcoin wallet in response to a Payment message:

    message PaymentACK {
        required Payment payment = 1;
        optional string memo = 2;
    }
memo UTF-8 encoded note that should be displayed to the customer

giving the status of the transaction (e.g. "Payment of 1 BTC for eleven tribbles accepted for processing.")

Localization

Merchants that support multiple languages should generate language-specific PaymentRequests, and either associate the language with the request or embed a language tag in the request's merchant_data. They should also generate a language-specific PaymentACK based on the original request.

For example: A greek-speaking customer browsing the Greek version of a merchant's website clicks on a "Αγορά τώρα" link, which generates a PaymentRequest with merchant_data set to "lang=el&basketId=11252". The customer pays, their bitcoin client sends a Payment message, and the merchant's website responds with PaymentACK.message "σας ευχαριστούμε".

Certificates

The default PKI system is X.509 certificates (the same system used to authenticate web servers). The format of pki_data when pki_type is "x509+sha256" or "x509+sha1" is a protocol-buffer-encoded certificate chain:

    message X509Certificates {
        repeated bytes certificate = 1;
    }

If pki_type is "x509+sha256", then the Payment message is hashed using the SHA256 algorithm to produce the message digest that is signed. If pki_type is "x509+sha1", then the SHA1 algorithm is used.

Each certificate is a DER [ITU.X690.1994] PKIX certificate value. The certificate containing the public key of the entity that digitally signed the PaymentRequest MUST be the first certificate. This MAY be followed by additional certificates, with each subsequent certificate being the one used to certify the previous one. The recipient MUST verify the certificate chain according to [RFC5280] and reject the PaymentRequest if any validation failure occurs.

Extensibility

The protocol buffers serialization format is designed to be extensible. In particular, new, optional fields can be added to a message and will be ignored (but saved/re-transmitted) by old implementations.

PaymentDetails messages may be extended with new optional fields and still be considered "version 1." Old implementations will be able to validate signatures against PaymentRequests containing the new fields, but (obviously) will not be able to display whatever information is contained in the new, optional fields to the user.

If it becomes necessary at some point in the future for merchants to produce PaymentRequest messages that are accepted *only* by new implementations, they can do so by defining a new PaymentDetails message with version=2. Old implementations should let the user know that they need to upgrade their software when they get an up-version PaymentDetails message.

Implementations that need to extend messages in this specification shall use tags starting at 1000, and shall update the wiki page at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_Request to avoid conflicts with other extensions.

References

BIP 71 : Payment Protocol bitcoin: URI extensions

BIP 72 : Payment Protocol mime types

Public-Key Infrastructure (X.509) working group : http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/pkix/charter/

Protocol Buffers : https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

See Also

Javascript Object Signing and Encryption working group : http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jose/

Wikipedia's page on Invoices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invoice especially the list of Electronic Invoice standards

sipa's payment protocol proposal: https://gist.github.com/1237788

ThomasV's "Signed Aliases" proposal : http://ecdsa.org/bitcoin_URIs.html

Homomorphic Payment Addresses and the Pay-to-Contract Protocol : http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.3257