I use Paypal as one of my payments options and have received an email about a Paypal update in October this year. I don't think this applies to my site but as I'm not a wizard at this stuff I thought I would ask all you knowledgeable people on here. I've copied the email below, thank you in advance for any advice.
Dear
In a bulletin dated the 18th of October, 2011, we announced that we were going to expand the number of IP addresses for www.paypal.com to improve our site’s performance, scalability and availability. As part of this transition, we planned to discontinue support for HTTP 1.0 protocol starting the 7th of October, 2013.
We have recently identified that this change may impact the ability of some of our merchants to perform IPN (Instant Payment Notification) post-back validation or PDT (Payment Data Transfer) posts to www.paypal.com and ipnpb.paypal.com. This happens when the IPN or PDT scripts use HTTP 1.0 protocol and do not include the “Host: www.paypal.com” or “Host: ipnpb.paypal.com” header in the HTTP request.
Additional Details
Starting the 7th of October, 2013, we will require all incoming requests to have a “Host” header which complies with HTTP 1.1 Specifications. This header was not required under HTTP 1.0. IPN and PDT scripts using HTTP 1.0 may start failing with “HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request” errors after the 7th of October, 2013, which will result in IPN messages not being validated successfully, or PDT scripts not being able to retrieve transaction information.
Action Required before the 7th of October, 2013
Merchants need to update their IPN and/or PDT scripts to use HTTP 1.1, and include the “Host” and “Connection: close” HTTP header in the IPN postback script.
Example with Host as www.paypal.com (please make necessary changes if you are using ipnpb.paypal.com):
ASP
//Set values for the request back
req.Method="POST";
req.Host="'www.paypal.com'";
req.ContentType="application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
Perl
$req=HTTP::Request->new('POST', 'https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr');
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$req->header(Host=> 'www.paypal.com');
$req->header(Connection=> 'close');
PHP
// post back to PayPal system to validate
$header="POST /cgi-bin/webscr HTTP/1.1\r\n";
$header .="Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
$header .="Host: www.paypal.com\r\n";
$header .="Connection: close\r\n\r\n";
Java
HttpsURLConnection uc=(HttpsURLConnection) u.openConnection();
uc.setDoOutput(true);
uc.setRequestProperty("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
uc.setRequestProperty("Host", "www.paypal.com");
uc.setRequestProperty("Connection", "Close");
The PayPal Sandbox has been configured to reject any HTTP requests without the “Host” header with HTTP 400 error. Merchants can use the Sandbox environment to certify the changes to their IPN and PDT scripts.
For more information on PDT and IPN, please refer to http://www.paypal.com/pdt and http://www.paypal.com/ipn. For additional information or questions about this change, please contact PayPal's Merchant Technical Support team via https://www.paypal.com/mts.
Sincerely,
PayPal
Dear
In a bulletin dated the 18th of October, 2011, we announced that we were going to expand the number of IP addresses for www.paypal.com to improve our site’s performance, scalability and availability. As part of this transition, we planned to discontinue support for HTTP 1.0 protocol starting the 7th of October, 2013.
We have recently identified that this change may impact the ability of some of our merchants to perform IPN (Instant Payment Notification) post-back validation or PDT (Payment Data Transfer) posts to www.paypal.com and ipnpb.paypal.com. This happens when the IPN or PDT scripts use HTTP 1.0 protocol and do not include the “Host: www.paypal.com” or “Host: ipnpb.paypal.com” header in the HTTP request.
Additional Details
Starting the 7th of October, 2013, we will require all incoming requests to have a “Host” header which complies with HTTP 1.1 Specifications. This header was not required under HTTP 1.0. IPN and PDT scripts using HTTP 1.0 may start failing with “HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request” errors after the 7th of October, 2013, which will result in IPN messages not being validated successfully, or PDT scripts not being able to retrieve transaction information.
Action Required before the 7th of October, 2013
Merchants need to update their IPN and/or PDT scripts to use HTTP 1.1, and include the “Host” and “Connection: close” HTTP header in the IPN postback script.
Example with Host as www.paypal.com (please make necessary changes if you are using ipnpb.paypal.com):
ASP
//Set values for the request back
req.Method="POST";
req.Host="'www.paypal.com'";
req.ContentType="application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
Perl
$req=HTTP::Request->new('POST', 'https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr');
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$req->header(Host=> 'www.paypal.com');
$req->header(Connection=> 'close');
PHP
// post back to PayPal system to validate
$header="POST /cgi-bin/webscr HTTP/1.1\r\n";
$header .="Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
$header .="Host: www.paypal.com\r\n";
$header .="Connection: close\r\n\r\n";
Java
HttpsURLConnection uc=(HttpsURLConnection) u.openConnection();
uc.setDoOutput(true);
uc.setRequestProperty("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
uc.setRequestProperty("Host", "www.paypal.com");
uc.setRequestProperty("Connection", "Close");
The PayPal Sandbox has been configured to reject any HTTP requests without the “Host” header with HTTP 400 error. Merchants can use the Sandbox environment to certify the changes to their IPN and PDT scripts.
For more information on PDT and IPN, please refer to http://www.paypal.com/pdt and http://www.paypal.com/ipn. For additional information or questions about this change, please contact PayPal's Merchant Technical Support team via https://www.paypal.com/mts.
Sincerely,
PayPal
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