| Internet-Draft | DelCookie | February 2025 |
| Weiss | Expires 28 August 2025 | [Page] |
This document specifies a Delete-Cookie HTTP header that instructs clients to delete cookies of certain names,
without requiring the server to know more details about them.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://yoavweiss.github.io/delete-cookie/draft-deletecookie-weiss-http.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-deletecookie-weiss-http/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/yoavweiss/delete-cookie.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 28 August 2025.¶
Copyright (c) 2025 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶
Long-operating web sites can often find themselves dealing with "cookie cruft" - cookies that no longer have backend logic that corresponds with them.¶
Such cookies may have been set at some point in the past with far-reaching expiration dates, and are now causing useless cookie bloat at best, or using up quotas at the expense of relevant cookies at worst¶
Deleting cookies is possible today by setting their expiry date to one in the past, but that requires one to know the "domain" and "path" parameters with which the cookies were set. That is not something that can be passively observed on the server side by default.¶
This draft proposes a new Delete-Cookie header which will enable servers to instruct clients
to delete cookies of a certain name from their cookie stores.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" 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.¶
This document uses the following terminology from Section 3 of [STRUCTURED-FIELDS] to specify syntax and parsing: Lists, tokens.¶
The Delete-Cookie header enables servers to delete cookies from user agents on their own registrable domains. These servers could have already deleted these same cookies by setting cookies with identical name, path and domain with an expiration date of 0. As such the header does not provide servers any new capabilities, beyond the convenience of not having to know the path and domain of a cookie in order to delete it.¶
IANA is asked to update the "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Field Name Registry" registry maintained at <https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-fields/http-fields.xhtml> according to the table below:¶
| Field Name | Status | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Delete-Cookie | permanent | Section 2 of this document |
Thanks to Anne van Kesteren and Pat Meenan on their feedback on early versions of this proposal.¶