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 This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 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Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as Kucherawy Expires December 8, 2011 [Page 1] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements June 2011 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 Kucherawy Expires December 8, 2011 [Page 2] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements June 2011 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 Kucherawy Expires December 8, 2011 [Page 3] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements June 2011 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 Kucherawy Expires December 8, 2011 [Page 4] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements June 2011 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. Kucherawy Expires December 8, 2011 [Page 5] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements June 2011 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 Kucherawy Expires December 8, 2011 [Page 6]