Network Working Group M. Kucherawy
Internet-Draft Cloudmark
Intended status: Informational April 2, 2012
Expires: October 4, 2012
Requirements For Internet Registry Services
draft-kucherawy-weirds-requirements-04
Abstract
This document enumerates a base set of requirements to be included in
any system that provides registration information for Internet
registration entities, i.e., network and/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.
It is hoped that this work will also influence 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.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on October 4, 2012.
Copyright Notice
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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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Protocol Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Classes of Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Reply Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Appendix A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Appendix B. Public Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
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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. It
also includes no support for internationalization, and it enables
only rudimentary (if any) differential service capabilities.
The CRISP working group created a workable and extensible standard
for replacing WHOIS, called [IRIS], which attempted to address these
problems. 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.
In recent years, ARIN and RIPE NCC have fielded production RESTful
web services to serve registry data, and each has met with success.
It is widely believed that this simpler re-use of Web technologies
familiar to modern web developers has enabled this success.
The requirements described here effectively sketch a framework for a
WHOIS replacement service that satisfies modern Internet needs and
shows some promise for widespread adoption by both clients and
servers.
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
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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. Protocol Requirements
The protocol requirements are as follows:
1. To support internationalized values, the protocol SHOULD be able
to deliver replies that contain data that are not exclusively
7-bit clean.
2. The protocol SHOULD be able to deliver a reply that is
effectively a referral or redirect to another server. The DNS
and some existing WHOIS extensions have had this capability for
some time, and this effort would do well to consider those
methods when developing this capability.
3. For replies, the protocol MUST use a data format that is well-
established. The use of this data format MUST incorporate
necessary features so that core data classes can be extended
easily and without the need to substitute those core data classes
to accommodate local or non-standard extensions. This
extensibility MUST NOT require clients to be programmed for local
extensions to interpret the standardized data classes.
4. The protocol MUST define a minimum set of fields and their
respective syntaxes that are to be included in every reply.
Context-specific extensions to this set MAY also be defined. The
set of fields MAY be different for names versus numbers, but a
common set of fields or data types between the two is expected.
5. Either the protocol or its underlying transport mechansim MUST be
capable of authentication of some kind sufficiently robust to
provide different quality-of-service to different clients once
they identify themselves in a reliable way.
6. The protocol SHOULD support the notion of including in the reply
a suggested time-to-live period during which the client is
expected to cache the reply and not query for it again.
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3.2. Classes of Service
Section 2 of [CRISP] lays out a comprehensive set of actors that are
parties to the registration data service being defined here. This
document is particularly interested in enumerating the needs of
various types of clients, such as:
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. Some
percentage of the clients in this class are likely to be abusers,
as described in Section 2.4.7 of [CRISP]; others are seeking
information useful in debugging DNS problems, as described in
Section 2.4.6 of [CRISP].
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. Section 2.4.2 of [CRISP] defines "Service Providers
and Network Operators", and this category appears to fit within
that definition.
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. See Section 2.4.4 of [CRISP] for further
description.
The development of data models for each type of service (names vs.
numbers) will need to consider the various requirements of different
types of clients coupled with local policy. Overly restrictive
policies and/or particularly sparse data in replies will mean the new
service is not very useful to clients, which will frustrate adoption.
3.3. Reply Syntax
The reply format needs to conform to the requirements enumerated
below.
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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.
o All date and/or time fields MUST be formatted as per [DATETIME].
o 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, and will
also vary by operator policy; however the following MUST be
provided in all replies:
* The creation date/time of the record
o 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.]
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.
Some topics those documents will need to cover include:
o Privacy considerations
o Denial of service attacks
o Redirection loops
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:
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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. Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the following for their contributions to
and reviews of this memo: Ray Bellis, John Levine, Alan Maitland,
Carlos Martinez, James Mitchell, S. Moonesamy, Andrew Newton,
Frederico Neves, Francisco Obispo, Arturo Servin, and Alessandro
Vesely.
Appendix B. 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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