Identification Protocol
RFC 1413

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Network Working Group                                       M. St. Johns
Request for Comments: 1413                      US Department of Defense
Obsoletes: 931                                             February 1993

                        Identification Protocol

Status of this Memo

   This RFC specifies an IAB standards track protocol for the Internet
   community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
   Please refer to the current edition of the "IAB Official Protocol
   Standards" for the standardization state and status of this protocol.
   Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

1.  INTRODUCTION

   The Identification Protocol (a.k.a., "ident", a.k.a., "the Ident
   Protocol") provides a means to determine the identity of a user of a
   particular TCP connection.  Given a TCP port number pair, it returns
   a character string which identifies the owner of that connection on
   the server's system.

   The Identification Protocol was formerly called the Authentication
   Server Protocol.  It has been renamed to better reflect its function.
   This document is a product of the TCP Client Identity Protocol
   Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

2.  OVERVIEW

   This is a connection based application on TCP.  A server listens for
   TCP connections on TCP port 113 (decimal).  Once a connection is
   established, the server reads a line of data which specifies the
   connection of interest.  If it exists, the system dependent user
   identifier of the connection of interest is sent as the reply.  The
   server may then either shut the connection down or it may continue to
   read/respond to multiple queries.

   The server should close the connection down after a configurable
   amount of time with no queries - a 60-180 second idle timeout is
   recommended.  The client may close the connection down at any time;
   however to allow for network delays the client should wait at least
   30 seconds (or longer) after a query before abandoning the query and
   closing the connection.

St. Johns                                                       [Page 1]
RFC 1413                Identification Protocol            February 1993

3.  RESTRICTIONS

   Queries are permitted only for fully specified connections.  The
   query contains the local/foreign port pair -- the local/foreign
   address pair used to fully specify the connection is taken from the
   local and foreign address of query connection.  This means a user on
   address A may only query the server on address B about connections
   between A and B.

4.  QUERY/RESPONSE FORMAT

   The server accepts simple text query requests of the form:

            <port-on-server> , <port-on-client>

   where <port-on-server> is the TCP port (decimal) on the target (where
   the "ident" server is running) system, and <port-on-client> is the
   TCP port (decimal) on the source (client) system.

   N.B - If a client on host A wants to ask a server on host B about a
   connection specified locally (on the client's machine) as 23, 6191
   (an inbound TELNET connection), the client must actually ask about
   6191, 23 - which is how the connection would be specified on host B.

      For example:

                 6191, 23

   The response is of the form

   <port-on-server> , <port-on-client> : <resp-type> : <add-info>

   where <port-on-server>,<port-on-client> are the same pair as the
   query, <resp-type> is a keyword identifying the type of response, and
   <add-info> is context dependent.

   The information returned is that associated with the fully specified
   TCP connection identified by <server-address>, <client-address>,
   <port-on-server>, <port-on-client>, where <server-address> and
   <client-address> are the local and foreign IP addresses of the
   querying connection -- i.e., the TCP connection to the Identification
   Protocol Server.  (<port-on-server> and <port-on-client> are taken
   from the query.)

      For example:

         6193, 23 : USERID : UNIX : stjohns
         6195, 23 : ERROR : NO-USER

St. Johns                                                       [Page 2]
RFC 1413                Identification Protocol            February 1993

5.  RESPONSE TYPES

A response can be one of two types:

USERID

     In this case, <add-info> is a string consisting of an
     operating system name (with an optional character set
     identifier), followed by ":", followed by an
     identification string.

     The character set (if present) is separated from the
     operating system name by ",".  The character set
     identifier is used to indicate the character set of the
     identification string.  The character set identifier,
     if omitted, defaults to "US-ASCII" (see below).

     Permitted operating system names and character set
     names are specified in RFC 1340, "Assigned Numbers" or
     its successors.

     In addition to those operating system and character set
     names specified in "Assigned Numbers" there is one