Network Working Group A. Newton
Internet-Draft ARIN
Intended status: Standards Track K. Ranjbar
Expires: November 11, 2012 RIPE NCC
A. Servin
LACNIC
B. Ellacott
APNIC
S. Hollenbeck
Verisign
S. Sheng
F. Arias
ICANN
N. Kong
CNNIC
F. Obispo
ISC
May 10, 2012
Using HTTP for RESTful Whois Services by Internet Registries
draft-designteam-weirds-using-http-00
Abstract
This document describes the use of HTTP in Whois services using
RESTful web methodologies.
Status of this Memo
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provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on November 11, 2012.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
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document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Design Intents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. Accept Header . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2. Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Types of HTTP Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.1. Positive Answers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.2. Redirects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.3. Negative Answers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.4. Malformed Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Use of JSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1. Signaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.2. Naming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Use of XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.1. Signaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.2. Naming and Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8. Common Error Response Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
9. Common Datatypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
10. Internationalization Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
10.1. URIs vs IRIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
10.2. Character Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
11. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Appendix A. Areas of Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
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1. Introduction
Over time, several deficiencies have been noted in the Whois protocol
as described in RFC 3912. The following is a partial list:
lack of standardized command structures
lack of standardized output and error structures
lack of support for internationalization (and therefore
localization)
lack of support for user identification, authentication, and
access control
This document describes the usage of HTTP for Internet registry Whois
services running on RESTful web servers for the purposes of
addressing the deficiencies as described above. The goal of this
document is to tie together the usage patterns of HTTP into a common
profile applicable to the various types of Internet registries
serving Whois data using RESTful styling. By giving the various
Internet registries a common behavior, a single client is better able
to retreive data from Internet registries adhering to this behavior.
The goal of this specification is to define a simple use of HTTP to
deliver Whois information using RESTful patterns. Where complexity
may reside, it is the goal of this specification to place it upon the
server and to keep the client as simple as possible. In the
vacubulary of computer programmers, it should be suffecient enough to
write a client for this application in bash using commands such as
wget or curl and other commonly available command line tools.
This is the basic usage pattern for this protocol:
1. A client issues an HTTP query using GET. As an example, a query
for the network registration 192.168.0.0 might be
http://example.com/ip/192.168.0.0.
2. If the receiving server has the information for the query, it
examines the Accept header of the query and returns a 200
response with a response entity appropriate for the requested
format.
3. If the receiving server does not have the information for the
query but does have knowledge of where the information can be
found, it will return a response of 301 or 303 with the Redirect
header containing an HTTP URL pointing to the information. The
client is expected to re-query using that HTTP URL.
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4. If the receiving server does not have the information being
requested and does not have knowledge of where the information
can be found, it should return a 404 response.
It is important to note that it is not the intent of this document to
redefine the meaning and semantics of HTTP. The purpose of this
document is to clarify the use of standard HTTP mechanisms for this
application.
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2. Terminology
As is noted in SSAC Report on WHOIS Terminology and Structure
[SAC-051], the term "Whois" is overloaded, often referring to a
protocol, a service and data. In accordance with [SAC-051], this
document describes the base behavior for a Registration Data Access
Protocol (RD-AP). At present, there are two known types of RD-AP, a
Domain Name Registration Data Access Protocol (DNRD-AP) and a Number
Resource Registration Data Access Protocol (NRRD-AP). Both the
DNRD-AP and NRRD-AP are to be built upon this base behavior, the
RD-AP.
Note that other types of RD-AP may exist in the future.
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3. Design Intents
There are a few design criteria this document attempts to support.
First, each query is meant to return either zero or one result. With
the maximum upper bound being set to one, the issuance of redirects
is simplified to the known document model used by HTTP [RFC2616].
Should a result contain more than one result, some of which are
better served by other servers, the redirection model becomes much
more complicated.
Second, multiple response formats are supported by this protocol.
This document outlines the base usage of JSON and XML, but server
operators may support other formats as they desire if appropriate.
Third, HTTP offers a number of transport protocol mechanisms not
described further in this document. Operators are able to make use
of these mechanisms according to their local policy, including cache
control, authorization, compression, and redirection. HTTP also
benefits from widespread investment in scalability, reliability, and
performance
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4. Queries
4.1. Accept Header
Clients SHOULD put the MIME type of the format they desire in the
Accept header. Servers SHOULD respond with an appropriate MIME type
in the Accept header in accordance with the preference rules for the
Accept header in HTTP [RFC2616]. However the use by clients of
multiple MIME types in the Accept header is NOT RECOMMENDED.
Clients may use a generic MIME type for the desired data format of
the response, but servers MUST respond with the most appropriate MIME
type. In other words, a client may use "application\json" to express
that it desires JSON or "application\weirds_blah_v1+json" to express
that it desires WEIRDS BLAH version 1 in JSON. The server MUST
respond with "application\weirds_blah_v1+json".
4.2. Parameters
To overcome issues with misbehaving HTTP [RFC2616] cache
infrastructure, clients may use the '__weirds__cachebust' query
parameter with a random value of their choosing. Servers MUST ignore
this query parameter.
The following is an example use of this parameter to retreive the
abuse contacts associated with the most specific IP network with the
address 192.0.2.0:
/ip/192.0.2.0/operator/contacts/abuse?__weirds_cachebust=xyz123
For all others, servers SHOULD ignore unknown query parameters.
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5. Types of HTTP Response
This section describes the various types of responses a server may
send to a client. While no standard HTTP response code is forbidden
in usage, at a minimum clients should understand the response codes
described in this section. It is expected that usage of response
codes and types for this application not defined here will be
described in subsequent documents.
5.1. Positive Answers
If a server has the information requested by the client and wishes to
respond to the client with the information according to its policies,
it should encode the answer in the format most appropriate according
to the standard and defined rules for processing the HTTP Accept
header, and return that answer in the body of a 200 response.
5.2. Redirects
If a server wishes to inform a client that the answer to a given
query can be found elsewhere, it should return either a 301 or a 303
reponse code and an HTTP URL in the Redirect header. The client is
expected to issue a subsequent query using the given URL without any
processing of the URL. In other words, the server is to hand back a
complete URL and the client should not have to transform the URL to
follow it.
A server should use a 301 response to inform the client of a
permanent move and a 303 repsonse otherwise. For this application,
such an example of a permentant move might be a TLD operator
informing a client the information being sought can be found with
another TLD operator (i.e. a query for the domain bar in foo.example
is found at http://foo.example/domain/bar).
5.3. Negative Answers
If a server wishes to respond that it has no information regarding
the query, it SHOULD return a 404 response code. Optionally, it may
include additional information regarding the lack of information as
defined by Section 8.
5.4. Malformed Queries
If a server receives a query which it cannot understand, it SHOULD
return a 503 response code. Optionally, it may include additional
information about why it does not understand the query as defined by
Section 8.
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6. Use of JSON
6.1. Signaling
Clients may signal their desire for JSON using the "application\json"
mime type or a more application specific JSON mime type.
6.2. Naming
Clients processing JSON [RFC4627] responses SHOULD ignore values
associated with unrecognized names. Servers MAY insert values
signified by names into the JSON responses which are not specified in
this document. Insertion of unspecified values into JSON responses
SHOULD have names prefixed with a short identifier followed by an
underscore followed by a meaningful name.
For example, "handle" may be specified as the name of a value which
is a string containing a registry unique identifier for a
registration. The registry of the Moon might desire to insert a
value specific to their services denoting that a registration occured
before or after the first moon landing. The name for such a value
might take the form "lunarNic_beforeOneSmallStep".
JSON names SHOULD only consist of the alphabetic ASCII characters A
through Z in both uppercase and lowercase, underscore characters, and
SHOULD NOT begin with an underscore character or the characters
"xml". This restriction is a union of the Ruby programming language
identifier syntax and the XML element name syntax and has two
purposes. First, client implementers using modern programming
languages such as Ruby or Java may use libraries that automatically
promote JSON values to first order object attributes or members (e.g.
using the example above, the values may be referenced as
network.handle or network.lunarNic_beforeOneSmallStep). Second, a
clean mapping between JSON and XML is easy to accomplish using the
JSON representation.
Clients processing JSON responses MUST be prepared for values
specified in the registry response documents to be absent from a
response as no JSON value listed is required to appear in the
response. In other words, servers MAY remove values as is needed by
the policies of the server operator.
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7. Use of XML
7.1. Signaling
Clients may signal their desire for XML using the "application\xml"
mime type or a more application specific XML mime type.
7.2. Naming and Structure
Well-formed XML may be programmatically produced using the JSON
encodings due to the JSON naming rules outlined in Section 6.2 and
the following simple rules:
1. Where a JSON name is given, the corresponding XML element has the
same name.
2. Where a JSON value is found, it is the content of the
corresponding XML element.
3. Where a JSON value is an array, the XML element is to be repeated
for each element of the array.
4. The root tag of the XML document is to be "response".
Consider the following JSON response.
{
"startAddress" : "10.0.0.0",
"endAddress" : "10.0.0.255",
"remarks" : [
"she sells seas shells",
"down by the seashore"
],
"uris" : [
{
"type" : "source",
"uri" : "http://whois-rws.net/network/xxxx"
},
{
"type" : "parent",
"uri" : "http://whois-rws.net/network/yyyy"
}
}
Figure 1
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The corresponding XML would look like this:
<response>
<startAddress>10.0.0.0</startAddress>
<endAddress>10.0.0.255</endAddress>
<remarks>She sells sea shells</remarks>
<remarks>down by the seashore</remarks>
<uris>
<type>source</type>
<uri>http://whois-rws.net/network/xxxx</uri>
</uris>
<uris>
<type>parent</type>
<uri>http://whois-rws.net/network/yyyy</uri>
</uris>
</response>
The rules for clients processing XML responses are the same as those
with JSON: clients SHOULD ignore unrecognized XML elements, and
servers MAY insert XML elements with tag names according to the
naming rules in Section 6.2. And as with JSON, clients MUST be
prepared for XML elements specified in the registry response
documents to be absent from a response as no XML element listed is
required to appear in the response.
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8. Common Error Response Body
As specified in Section 5, some non-answer responses may return
entity bodies with information that could be more descriptive.
The basic structure of that response is a data class containing an
error code number (corresponding to the HTTP response code) followed
by a string named "title" followed by an array of strings named
"description".
This is an example of the JSON version of the common response body.
{
"errorCode": 418
"title": "No More Tacos",
"description": [
"We ran out of shells and sauce.",
"Come back tomorrow." ]
}
Figure 2
This is an example of the XML version of the common response body.
<response>
<errorCode>418</errorCode>
<title>No More Tacos</title>
<description>We ran out of shells and sauce.</description>
<description>Come back tomorrow.</description>
</response>
Figure 3
The MIME type for the JSON structure is
"application\weirds_common_error_v1+json" and the MIME type for the
XML document is "application\weirds_common_error_v1+xml".
A client MAY simply use the HTTP response code as the server is not
required to include error data in the response body. However, if a
client wishes to parse the error data, it SHOULD first check that the
Accept header contains the appropriate MIME type.
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9. Common Datatypes
This section describes common data types found in Internet
registries. Unless otherwise stated by the response specification of
an Internet registry using this specification as a basis, the data
types can assume to be as follows:
1. IPv4 addresses - [RFC0791]
2. IPv6 addresses - [RFC5952]
3. country code - [ISO.3166.1988]
4. domain name - [RFC4343]
5. email address - [RFC5322]
6. date and time strings - [RFC3339]
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10. Internationalization Considerations
10.1. URIs vs IRIs
Clients MAY use IRIs as they see fit, but MUST transform them to URIs
[RFC3986] for interaction with RD-AP servers. RD-AP servers MUST use
URIs in all responses, and clients MAY transform these URIs to IRIs.
10.2. Character Encoding
The default text encoding for JSON and XML responses in RD-AP is
UTF-8, and all servers and clients MUST support UTF-8. Servers and
clients MAY optionally support other character encodings.
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11. Normative References
[SAC-051] Piscitello, D., Ed., "SSAC Report on Domain Name WHOIS
Terminology and Structure", September 2011.
[RFC4627] Crockford, D., "The application/json Media Type for
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)", RFC 4627, July 2006.
[RFC3339] Klyne, G., Ed. and C. Newman, "Date and Time on the
Internet: Timestamps", RFC 3339, July 2002.
[RFC4034] Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
Rose, "Resource Records for the DNS Security Extensions",
RFC 4034, March 2005.
[RFC0791] Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791,
September 1981.
[RFC5952] Kawamura, S. and M. Kawashima, "A Recommendation for IPv6
Address Text Representation", RFC 5952, August 2010.
[ISO.3166.1988]
International Organization for Standardization, "Codes for
the representation of names of countries, 3rd edition",
ISO Standard 3166, August 1988.
[RFC5396] Huston, G. and G. Michaelson, "Textual Representation of
Autonomous System (AS) Numbers", RFC 5396, December 2008.
[RFC4343] Eastlake, D., "Domain Name System (DNS) Case Insensitivity
Clarification", RFC 4343, January 2006.
[RFC3986] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66,
RFC 3986, January 2005.
[RFC5322] Resnick, P., Ed., "Internet Message Format", RFC 5322,
October 2008.
[RFC2616] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H.,
Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999.
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Appendix A. Areas of Improvement
Things that need to be done to this draft.
1. authentication what?
2. clean up must should, ref 2119?
3. better language on data formats... it was just a rough start
4. IANA considerations
5. Security considerations?
6. Is there a privacy considerations things we have to do now?
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Authors' Addresses
Andrew Lee Newton
American Registry for Internet Numbers
3635 Concorde Parkway
Chantilly, VA 20151
US
Email: andy@arin.net
URI: http://www.arin.net
Kaveh Ranjbar
RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Singel 258
Amsterdam 1016AB
NL
Email: kranjbar@ripe.net
URI: http://www.ripe.net
Arturo L. Servin
Latin American and Caribbean Internet Address Registry
Rambla Republica de Mexico 6125
Montevideo 11300
UY
Email: aservin@lacnic.net
URI: http://www.lacnic.net
Byron J. Ellacott
Asia Pacific Network Information Center
6 Cordelia Street
South Brisbane QLD 4101
Australia
Email: bje@apnic.net
URI: http://www.apnic.net
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Scott Hollenbeck
Verisign Labs
12061 Bluemont Way
Reston, VA 20190
US
Email: shollenbeck@verisign.com
URI: http://www.verisignlabs.com/
Steve Sheng
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
United States of America
Phone: +1.310.823.9358
Email: steve.sheng@icann.org
Francisco Arias
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
United States of America
Phone: +1.310.823.9358
Email: francisco.arias@icann.org
Ning Kong
China Internet Network Information Center
4 South 4th Street, Zhongguancun, Haidian District
Beijing 100190
China
Phone: +86 10 5881 3147
Email: nkong@cnnic.cn
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Francisco Obispo
Internet Systems Consortium
950 Charter St
Redwood City, CA 94063
United States of America
Phone: +1.650.423.1374
Email: fobispo@isc.org
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