Network Working Group M. Kucherawy
Internet-Draft Cloudmark
Intended status: Informational June 6, 2011
Expires: December 8, 2011
Requirements For Internet Registry Services
draft-kucherawy-weirds-requirements-00
Abstract
This document enumerates a base set of requirements that should be
included in any system that provides registration information for
Internet entities, be they network assignments or domain name
assignments. Some of these, in turn, will define requirements for
registrars; this, however, is an issue outside of the scope of this
document.
Status of this Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on December 8, 2011.
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Document Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Terminology and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1. Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.2. Incorporated Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4.1. Clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4.2. Servers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. 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, and also presents several working APIs for
standardization to improve service to all constituents.
2. Document Series
This memo represents the introduction to a series of others that
define the overall problem and some available solutions. The series
is as follows:
1. RFCxxxx: Requirements for Internet Registry Services (this memo)
2. RFCxxxx+1: The ICANN Internet Registry Service API
3. RFCxxxx+2: The RIPE Internet Registry Service API
4. RFCxxxx+3: The ARIN Internet Registry Service API
5. RFCxxxx+4: RESTful WHOIS
The intent is to publish one of the API specifications as a standards
track document, and the remainder (including this memo) as
informational documents.
3. Terminology and Definitions
This section defines terms used in the rest of the document.
3.1. 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
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words are meant to describe requirements for those proposals for a
WHOIS replacement that seek standards track status.
3.2. 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.
4. Requirements
This section enumerates the basic requirements of any WHOIS
replacement system.
4.1. Clients
The client-side requirements are as follows:
1. A client SHOULD be able to handle replies that contain data that
are not exclusively 7-bit clean.
2. A client MAY be able to handle UDP replies, and if the server
provides service with UDP, the client SHOULD attempt a UDP query
prior to a TCP query.
3. 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.
4. A client SHOULD be able to handle a reply that is effectively a
referral or redirect to another server.
With respect to a UDP service, a subset of the service could be
implemented via the DNS, using [EXPAND-DNS].
4.2. Servers
The server-side requirements are as follows:
1. A server MUST accept and process all queries except when in a
defensive posture against a denial-of-service or other security
attack. Limiting the number of queries per time interval from a
particular source MUST NOT be done.
2. 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
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particular:
* All date and/or time fields MUST be formatted as per
[DATETIME].
3. 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.
4. 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 of the record
* The date on which the record most recently changed owners/
registrants
* For domain name registration records, the identifier of the
registrar that created the record
* For domain name registration records, 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
5. A server MAY provide different output based on the nature of the
client, where such can be definitively determined.
5. IANA Considerations
This memo presents no actions for IANA, though later memos in this
series are likely to do so.
6. Security Considerations
This memo introduces an overall protocol model, but no implementation
details. Specific security considerations of the various approaches
presented in this document series will be described in those other
documents.
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7. 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.
[EXPAND-DNS]
Faltstrom, P., Ed., Austein, R., Ed., and P. Koch, Ed.,
"Design Choices when Expanding the DNS", RFC 5507,
April 2009.
[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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