Requirements For Internet Registry Services
draft-kucherawy-weirds-requirements-02

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

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on August 3, 2012.

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   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
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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

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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:

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   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.

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       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.]

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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

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