A Leaner and Faster Web: How CBOR Can Improve Dynamic Content Encoding in JSON and DNS over HTTPS

TL;DR

This paper explores using CBOR, a compact binary data format, to improve dynamic content encoding in JSON and DNS over HTTPS, significantly reducing data size and latency for web content delivery.

Contribution

It introduces a CBOR-based encoding approach for JSON and DNS over HTTPS, including new compression schemes, leading to substantial size reductions and performance improvements.

Findings

JSON to CBOR reduces data size by up to 80%

CBOR-based DNS messages minimize packets by up to 95.5%

New name compression schemes save up to 226 bytes

Abstract

The Internet community has taken major efforts to decrease latency in the World Wide Web. Significant improvements have been achieved in accelerating content transport and in compressing static content. Less attention, however, has been dedicated to dynamic content compression. Such content is commonly provided by JSON and DNS over HTTPS. Aligned with the overall Web trend, dynamic content objects continue to grow in size, which increases latency and fosters the digital inequality. In this paper, we propose to counter this increase by utilizing components engineered for the constrained Internet of Things (IoT). We focus on the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and its use for dynamic content encoded in JSON or in DNS over HTTPS messages. CBOR was originally introduced to restrict packet sizes in constrained environments and enables small, effective encoding of data objects. We measure that simply switching the data representation from JSON to CBOR reduces data by up to 80.0% for a corpus of JSON objects collected via the HTTP Archive. This size reduction can decrease loading times by up to 13.8% when downloading large objects -- even in local setups. A new CBOR-based DNS message format designed for use with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over CoAP (DoC) minimizes packets by up to 95.5% in its packed form and shows large potential for additionally compressing names and addresses. We contribute two name compression schemes that apply to the new CBOR format and save up to 226 bytes in a response. The decoder for our name compression scheme is lean and can fit into as little as 314 bytes of binary build size. One of those compression schemes and further optimization proposals directly influenced further improvements of the new CBOR format within Internet standardization.