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. 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/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on October 4, 2012. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect Kucherawy Expires October 4, 2012 [Page 1] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements April 2012 to this document. 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 described in the Simplified BSD License. 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 Kucherawy Expires October 4, 2012 [Page 2] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements April 2012 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 Kucherawy Expires October 4, 2012 [Page 3] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements April 2012 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. Kucherawy Expires October 4, 2012 [Page 4] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements April 2012 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. Kucherawy Expires October 4, 2012 [Page 5] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements April 2012 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: Kucherawy Expires October 4, 2012 [Page 6] Internet-Draft WHOIS Requirements April 2012 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 Kucherawy Expires October 4, 2012 [Page 7]