Network Working Group M. Kucherawy Internet-Draft Cloudmark Intended status: Informational January 31, 2012 Expires: August 3, 2012 Requirements For Internet Registry Services draft-kucherawy-weirds-requirements-02 Abstract This document enumerates a base set of requirements that should be included in any system that provides registration information for Internet network entities, i.e., network assignments. Some of these, in turn, will define requirements for registrars; this, however, is an issue outside of the scope of this document. It is hoped that this work will influnce the development of requirements and specifications for domain name registries at some point in the future. Status of this Memo 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 http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on August 3, 2012. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2012 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 (http://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 Kucherawy Expires August 3, 2012 [Page 1] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements January 2012 to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Terminology and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1. Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.2. Incorporated Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3.1. Clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3.2. Servers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Appendix A. Public Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Kucherawy Expires August 3, 2012 [Page 2] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements January 2012 1. Introduction The ubiquitous [WHOIS] service can be used today to query for domain name registration or network or subnetwork assignment information by the general public. It is however a very simple protocol, whose output is free-form and thus not amenable to machine parsing. The CRISP working group created a workable and extensible standard for replacing WHOIS, called [IRIS]. Unfortunately, IRIS has seen little to no deployment for various reasons, mostly its complexity compared to WHOIS and some political and technical inertia. Thus, this effort confronts anew the need for a better service than WHOIS provides, by first laying down a framework of requirements that such a service needs to accommodate to become a viable alternative to WHOIS. 2. Terminology and Definitions This section defines terms used in the rest of the document. 2.1. Keywords The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [KEYWORDS]. In particular, since this is not a standards track document, these key words are meant to describe requirements for those proposals for a WHOIS replacement that seek standards track status. 2.2. Incorporated Requirements Many of the requirements distilled from the input provided by various communities in [CRISP] will apply to this effort as well. It is certainly the case that the research presented there should be considered prerequisite reading for this new work. 3. Requirements This section enumerates the basic requirements of any WHOIS replacement system. 3.1. Clients The client-side requirements are as follows: Kucherawy Expires August 3, 2012 [Page 3] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements January 2012 1. To support internationalized values, a client SHOULD be able to handle replies that contain data that are not exclusively 7-bit clean. 2. A client SHOULD support caching of replies. It MAY apply its own default and MAY use a time-to-live provided as part of the reply. 3. A client SHOULD be able to handle a reply that is effectively a referral or redirect to another server. 4. A client MUST be able to decode a reply using a well-established generic encoding mechanism such as XML or JSON. [We need to choose one and standardize on it.] 3.2. Servers The server-side requirements are as follows: 1. A server MUST be able to return internationalized data. 2. A server MUST be able to return a result that indicates to a client that the answer sought is not available here, but can be found elsewhere (i.e., a referral mechanism). The DNS has well- established facilities for doing so and this effort might do well to consider those methods. 3. A server SHOULD be able to provide class-of-service facilities for different types of users. At least the following cases need to be considered: anonymous: Users with no prior arrangement for access to the data; typically all available data will be provided in response to a query, but the query rate may be severely limited. No authentication is typically required. Some data considered to be personally identifiable information MAY be elided. security: Users that have an interest in a specific subset of a registration's data for the purpose of analysis and correlation while evaluating the trustworthiness of the source. Examples include email client evaluation, email content evaluation, web site security, etc. The subset will typically include creation/registration dates, assigned nameserver names and IP addresses, registrar ID and registrant ID. Users in this class would be required to authenticate in some way, but such clients would not typically be subjected to rate limiting given the prior arrangement. Kucherawy Expires August 3, 2012 [Page 4] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements January 2012 law enforcement: Users with a bona fide interest in as much registration data, including change history, as is available. Typically, queries would be rare but have extremely high priority. These clients would definitely require authentication and probably also require encryption. 4. A server MUST reply in a univerally standard format; free-form replies MUST NOT be used, although the standard format may have provisions for some fields that are free-form within it. In particular: * All date and/or time fields MUST be formatted as per [DATETIME]. 5. NOTE: The standard format is expected to be a significant portion of the work on the way to describing a new overall WHOIS specification. In any case, machine-parsability of replies is crucial to the success of this work. 6. A server MUST provide a minimum set of data about a given query. It is expected that this minimum set will be different for a network allocation registry than a domain name registry, however the following MUST be provided: * The creation date/time of the record * The date/time on which the record most recently changed owners/registrants * The date/time on which any other part of the record was modified * The identifier of the registrar that created the record * The identifier of the registrant that created the record * For network registration records, the size of the assigned subnet in terms of a number of bits 7. A server MAY provide different output based on the nature of the client, where such can be definitively determined. 4. IANA Considerations This memo presents no actions for IANA. [RFC Editor: Please remove this section prior to publication.] Kucherawy Expires August 3, 2012 [Page 5] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements January 2012 5. Security Considerations This memo introduces an overall protocol model, but no implementation details. Specific security considerations of the implementation(s) that meet these requirements will be provided in their defining documents. 6. Informative References [CRISP] Newton, A., "Cross Registry Internet Service Protocol (CRISP) Requirements", RFC 3707, February 2004. [DATETIME] Klyne, G. and C. Newman, "Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps", RFC 3339, July 2002. [IRIS] Newton, A. and M. Sanz, "IRIS: The Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) Core Protocol", RFC 3981, January 2005. [KEYWORDS] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. [WHOIS] Daigle, L., "WHOIS Protocol Specification", RFC 3912, September 2004. Appendix A. Public Discussion Public discussion of this suite of memos takes place on the weirds@ietf.org mailing list. See https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds. Author's Address Murray S. Kucherawy Cloudmark 128 King St., 2nd Floor San Francisco, CA 94107 USA Phone: +1 415 946 3800 Email: msk@cloudmark.com Kucherawy Expires August 3, 2012 [Page 6]