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Checking references for intended status: Informational ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- No issues found here. Summary: 0 errors (**), 0 flaws (~~), 1 warning (==), 1 comment (--). Run idnits with the --verbose option for more detailed information about the items above. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 Network Working Group M. Kucherawy 3 Internet-Draft Cloudmark 4 Intended status: Informational April 2, 2012 5 Expires: October 4, 2012 7 Requirements For Internet Registry Services 8 draft-kucherawy-weirds-requirements-04 10 Abstract 12 This document enumerates a base set of requirements to be included in 13 any system that provides registration information for Internet 14 registration entities, i.e., network and/or domain name assignments. 15 Some of these, in turn, will define requirements for registrars; 16 this, however, is an issue outside of the scope of this document. 18 It is hoped that this work will also influence the development of 19 requirements and specifications for domain name registries at some 20 point in the future. 22 Status of this Memo 24 This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the 25 provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. 27 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering 28 Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute 29 working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- 30 Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 32 Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months 33 and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any 34 time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference 35 material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." 37 This Internet-Draft will expire on October 4, 2012. 39 Copyright Notice 41 Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the 42 document authors. All rights reserved. 44 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal 45 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents 46 (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of 47 publication of this document. Please review these documents 48 carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect 49 to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must 50 include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of 51 the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as 52 described in the Simplified BSD License. 54 Table of Contents 56 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 57 2. Terminology and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 58 2.1. Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 59 2.2. Incorporated Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 60 3. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 61 3.1. Protocol Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 62 3.2. Classes of Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 63 3.3. Reply Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 64 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 65 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 66 6. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 67 Appendix A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 68 Appendix B. Public Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 69 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 71 1. Introduction 73 The ubiquitous [WHOIS] service can be used today to query for domain 74 name registration or network or subnetwork assignment information by 75 the general public. It is however a very simple protocol, whose 76 output is free-form and thus not amenable to machine parsing. It 77 also includes no support for internationalization, and it enables 78 only rudimentary (if any) differential service capabilities. 80 The CRISP working group created a workable and extensible standard 81 for replacing WHOIS, called [IRIS], which attempted to address these 82 problems. Unfortunately, IRIS has seen little to no deployment for 83 various reasons, mostly its complexity compared to WHOIS and some 84 political and technical inertia. 86 Thus, this effort confronts anew the need for a better service than 87 WHOIS provides, by first laying down a framework of requirements that 88 such a service needs to accommodate to become a viable alternative to 89 WHOIS. 91 In recent years, ARIN and RIPE NCC have fielded production RESTful 92 web services to serve registry data, and each has met with success. 93 It is widely believed that this simpler re-use of Web technologies 94 familiar to modern web developers has enabled this success. 96 The requirements described here effectively sketch a framework for a 97 WHOIS replacement service that satisfies modern Internet needs and 98 shows some promise for widespread adoption by both clients and 99 servers. 101 2. Terminology and Definitions 103 This section defines terms used in the rest of the document. 105 2.1. Keywords 107 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", 108 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this 109 document are to be interpreted as described in [KEYWORDS]. In 110 particular, since this is not a standards track document, these key 111 words are meant to describe requirements for those proposals for a 112 WHOIS replacement that seek standards track status. 114 2.2. Incorporated Requirements 116 Many of the requirements distilled from the input provided by various 117 communities in [CRISP] will apply to this effort as well. It is 118 certainly the case that the research presented there should be 119 considered prerequisite reading for this new work. 121 3. Requirements 123 This section enumerates the basic requirements of any WHOIS 124 replacement system. 126 3.1. Protocol Requirements 128 The protocol requirements are as follows: 130 1. To support internationalized values, the protocol SHOULD be able 131 to deliver replies that contain data that are not exclusively 132 7-bit clean. 134 2. The protocol SHOULD be able to deliver a reply that is 135 effectively a referral or redirect to another server. The DNS 136 and some existing WHOIS extensions have had this capability for 137 some time, and this effort would do well to consider those 138 methods when developing this capability. 140 3. For replies, the protocol MUST use a data format that is well- 141 established. The use of this data format MUST incorporate 142 necessary features so that core data classes can be extended 143 easily and without the need to substitute those core data classes 144 to accommodate local or non-standard extensions. This 145 extensibility MUST NOT require clients to be programmed for local 146 extensions to interpret the standardized data classes. 148 4. The protocol MUST define a minimum set of fields and their 149 respective syntaxes that are to be included in every reply. 150 Context-specific extensions to this set MAY also be defined. The 151 set of fields MAY be different for names versus numbers, but a 152 common set of fields or data types between the two is expected. 154 5. Either the protocol or its underlying transport mechansim MUST be 155 capable of authentication of some kind sufficiently robust to 156 provide different quality-of-service to different clients once 157 they identify themselves in a reliable way. 159 6. The protocol SHOULD support the notion of including in the reply 160 a suggested time-to-live period during which the client is 161 expected to cache the reply and not query for it again. 163 3.2. Classes of Service 165 Section 2 of [CRISP] lays out a comprehensive set of actors that are 166 parties to the registration data service being defined here. This 167 document is particularly interested in enumerating the needs of 168 various types of clients, such as: 170 anonymous: Users with no prior arrangement for access to the data; 171 typically all available data will be provided in response to a 172 query, but the query rate may be severely limited. No 173 authentication is typically required. Some data considered to be 174 personally identifiable information MAY be elided. Some 175 percentage of the clients in this class are likely to be abusers, 176 as described in Section 2.4.7 of [CRISP]; others are seeking 177 information useful in debugging DNS problems, as described in 178 Section 2.4.6 of [CRISP]. 180 security: Users that have an interest in a specific subset of a 181 registration's data for the purpose of analysis and correlation 182 while evaluating the trustworthiness of the source. Examples 183 include email client evaluation, email content evaluation, web 184 site security, etc. The subset will typically include creation/ 185 registration dates, assigned nameserver names and IP addresses, 186 registrar ID and registrant ID. Users in this class would be 187 required to authenticate in some way, but such clients would not 188 typically be subjected to rate limiting given the prior 189 arrangement. Section 2.4.2 of [CRISP] defines "Service Providers 190 and Network Operators", and this category appears to fit within 191 that definition. 193 law enforcement: Users with a bona fide interest in as much 194 registration data, including change history, as is available. 195 Typically, queries would be rare but have extremely high priority. 196 These clients would definitely require authentication and probably 197 also require encryption. See Section 2.4.4 of [CRISP] for further 198 description. 200 The development of data models for each type of service (names vs. 201 numbers) will need to consider the various requirements of different 202 types of clients coupled with local policy. Overly restrictive 203 policies and/or particularly sparse data in replies will mean the new 204 service is not very useful to clients, which will frustrate adoption. 206 3.3. Reply Syntax 208 The reply format needs to conform to the requirements enumerated 209 below. 211 NOTE: The standard format is expected to be a significant portion of 212 the work on the way to describing a new overall WHOIS specification. 213 In any case, machine-parsability of replies is crucial to the success 214 of this work. 216 o All date and/or time fields MUST be formatted as per [DATETIME]. 218 o A server MUST provide a minimum set of data about a given query. 219 It is expected that this minimum set will be different for a 220 network allocation registry than a domain name registry, and will 221 also vary by operator policy; however the following MUST be 222 provided in all replies: 224 * The creation date/time of the record 226 o A server MAY provide different output based on the nature of the 227 client, where such can be definitively determined. 229 4. IANA Considerations 231 This memo presents no actions for IANA. [RFC Editor: Please remove 232 this section prior to publication.] 234 5. Security Considerations 236 This memo introduces an overall protocol model, but no implementation 237 details. Specific security considerations of the implementation(s) 238 that meet these requirements will be provided in their defining 239 documents. 241 Some topics those documents will need to cover include: 243 o Privacy considerations 245 o Denial of service attacks 247 o Redirection loops 249 6. Informative References 251 [CRISP] Newton, A., "Cross Registry Internet Service Protocol 252 (CRISP) Requirements", RFC 3707, February 2004. 254 [DATETIME] 255 Klyne, G. and C. Newman, "Date and Time on the Internet: 257 Timestamps", RFC 3339, July 2002. 259 [IRIS] Newton, A. and M. Sanz, "IRIS: The Internet Registry 260 Information Service (IRIS) Core Protocol", RFC 3981, 261 January 2005. 263 [KEYWORDS] 264 Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate 265 Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. 267 [WHOIS] Daigle, L., "WHOIS Protocol Specification", RFC 3912, 268 September 2004. 270 Appendix A. Acknowledgements 272 The author wishes to thank the following for their contributions to 273 and reviews of this memo: Ray Bellis, John Levine, Alan Maitland, 274 Carlos Martinez, James Mitchell, S. Moonesamy, Andrew Newton, 275 Frederico Neves, Francisco Obispo, Arturo Servin, and Alessandro 276 Vesely. 278 Appendix B. Public Discussion 280 Public discussion of this suite of memos takes place on the 281 weirds@ietf.org mailing list. See 282 https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds. 284 Author's Address 286 Murray S. Kucherawy 287 Cloudmark 288 128 King St., 2nd Floor 289 San Francisco, CA 94107 290 USA 292 Phone: +1 415 946 3800 293 Email: msk@cloudmark.com