One document matched: draft-faltstrom-whois-03.txt
Differences from draft-faltstrom-whois-02.txt
Referal extension to the Whois protocol
draft-faltstrom-whois-03.txt
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document presents extensions to the Whois protocol output
format which enables a possibility for the server to send referal
information to the Whois client. This referal mechanism can be used
for example in a situation with a registrar/registry model, where
the registrars all have their own Whois databases, and together they
serve a whole TLD. It can also be used when implementing a
root-whois service on top of all whois servers in the world, and
this way enable the possibility of creating advanced proxy services.
For the latter, a registration procedure is also suggested, where
Whois services can be registered.
Discussion on this Internet-Draft is to be held on the mailing list
ietf-whois-ext@imc.org, which is hosted by the Internet Mail
Consortium. To subscribe, send an email to
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ietf-whois-ext-request@imc.org, with the text "subscribe" as the
only word in the body of the mail. There is an archive of the
mailing list at <http://www.imc.org/ietf-whois-ext/>.
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1. Introduction
The whois service[1] as it used today is a pure client-server
protocol. There is no means for a client to know what server to
query, and no way a server can give back information to a client
about other matches at other Whois servers. I.e. there is no way one
can with the Whois protocol build distributed Whois services.
Several attempts have been made, like Whois++ and RWhois, but the
most successful ones have been Whois services which in turn act as
proxies, so the client uses the same old Whois protocol, and the
server hide the fact that the query from the client is fan out to
more than one server in turn.
This document is a try to define extensions to the Whois protocol
which makes it easier to develop such proxy services.
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2. Background
There is an operational need on the Internet to get to know the
technical contact for a certain domainname or IP-address. Today,
this information is stored in Whois servers, and the clients used
are using the Whois protocol to get the data.
The whois servers are run by entities responsible for a domain, a
block of IP addresses or such. To be able to get information, the
client need to know which Whois service do have information about
the record queried for.
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3. IANA
IANA is responsible for handling out IP-addresses and domainnames in
the world. This responsibility is delegated to, regarding
domainnames, registries for TLDs, and for IP-addresses the regional
registres that exists in the world.
Each one of these registries can in turn have delegated the
responsibility for delegation, and in some cases this has also
implied delegation of responsibility of running a Whois service for
that delegated part of the address space, and in some cases not.
Especially when a registry in turn have registrars doing
registrations and delegations on behalf of the registry, the issue
with Whois service for the information becomes complicated.
Because of these increased complicated structures of the Whois
services in the world, this document suggests some structure to the
Whois protocol which makes it possible for IANA and others to
implement proxy services on top of all the Whois servers that exist,
and will exist in the future.
It is extremely important that backward compatibility is kept for
whois clients, i.e. we talk in this paper about the protocol between
the server holding the information and the proxy, not between the
proxy and the Whois client.
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4. Format
4.1 Version
Any server using any of these extensions MUST have a line which is
the first in the Whois output which reads:
% VERSION RFCXXXX
The version text is expected to specify what formatting
specification this whois server follows. Examples include: RIPE-181,
RFC2280, RFC2167 or RFCXXXX.
Note to RFC-editor: The text RFCXXXX is supposed to be replaced with
the correct RFC number of this document.
4.2 Character set
The basic protocol is US-ASCII only. We suggest that a whois service
can announce the character set used by using the specific line in
the Whois output:
% CHARSET UTF-8
(UTF-8 in the example above is just an example)
Any character set registered by IANA can be used. Software which is
compliant with this extension MUST be able to handle the character
set UTF-8.
It should be noted that this is an extension to the Whois protocol,
which is 7-bit only.
The CHARSET statement MUST be present in the whois output before any
use of the charset itself.
A CHARSET statement MUST NOT be used more than once in each whois
response.
4.3 Referral
A Whois service can announce a referral by using the specific line
in the Whois output:
% REFERRAL WHOIS://WHOIS.EXAMPLE.NET/FOO
The string after "REFERRAL" is an example of a WHOIS URI.
A Whois URI is defined by:
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whoisurl = "whois://" hostport [ "/" whoissrch ]
where
whoissrch = *uchar
4.4 Copyright
A Whois service can provide copyright information regarding the data
provided with the Whois service itself through the following
message:
% COPYRIGHT HTTP://WHOIS.EXAMPLE.NET/COPYRIGHT/
It is recommended that the text in the copyright string should
include a URL, and not the copyright statement itself, as in the
example above.
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5. Usage of these extensions
5.1 Proxy deployment
It is expected that any organization can produce a Whois proxy which
understands these extensions. The proxy can using this information
both convert character sets and act as a proxy (query more than one
server) without the Whois client knowing that the service didn't
have the data locally.
The proxy service is expected to get initial referral information
(i.e. a list of Whois servers to query) from a central repository,
IANA.
5.2 Initial feed of referral information
IANA is presumed to in the contract with TLD and IP-address
registries include enough information so that the registry inform
IANA on where the Whois service is located (hostname/portnumber).
IANA should publish a list of available Whois servers on it's
ftp-site, so any whois proxy service can fetch the latest
information at it's will.
The format of this list is a number of specifications, one per whois
URL construction available. Each one of the specifications create a
block. The name of the block is a Whois URI (see below) where
constructions "backslash" + "integer" is replaced by parenthesis
expressions in the regular expressions existing inside the options
of the block, like replacements possible in the Unix command "sed".
The options describes the server, or the data residing on it.
Examples:
whois "whois://whois.example.se/\1" {
domain {"(.*\.se)";};
charset "iso-8859-1";
};
whois "whois://whois.example.jp/\1%20charset=us-ascii" {
domain {"(.*\.jp)";};
charset "iso-8859-1";
};
whois "whois://whois.example.jp/\1%20charset=iso-3166-jp" {
domain {"(.*\.jp)";};
charset "iso-3166-jp";
};
whois "whois://whois.ripe.net/\1" {
domain {"(.*ripe.net)";};
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ip4net {(192.71.0.0/16); (192.72.0.0/16);};
handle {"(RIPE-.*)";};
charset "US-ASCII";
};
More attributes can be added in the future by adding new options. A
client MUST accept any options, while only parsing the ones which it
is interested in.
More than one block might match a query, and other options (such as
character set) inside the block might give hints on what server
might be interesting to query.
5.3 domain - Domain name information
A list of domainnames which this whois server is authoritative for.
5.4 ip4net - IPv4 information
A list of IP-address version 4 blocks in CIDR format (IP-address +
netmask) which this whois server is authoritative for.
5.5 handle - Whois handles
A list of handles which this whois server is authoritative for.
5.6 charset - Character set
Specification on what character set this whois server will give
output in, also specified via the "% CHARSET" statement in the Whois
output.
5.7 Output from proxy service to whois client
A proxy service SHOULD give information on the hostname (for example
via a URI to the original object) to the Whois service where the
record originated from. This so a human parsing the output from the
Whois client can reissue the query to this originating Whois service
to get more information if he so wishes.
5.8 Registry
A Registry Whois service holds from the proxy perspective
information about names which is delegated from IANA. The Whois
server can be implemented either as a Whois Proxy service, a Whois
server or a Whois referral server as described in this paper.
Changes on the whois server, for example move of the service from
one IP-address to another, have to be reported by the registry to
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IANA, which updates the list of Whois servers.
5.9 Registrar, second level Whois service
The second level service can in turn either be a Whois service, a
referral server too, or a whois proxy service. It can also be the
case that the Registry run the whois service for the whole from IANA
delegated block of addresses, and the Registrar reporting changes to
the Registry.
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6. IANA Considerations
IANA is to keep track of all registered Whois servers, in the format
described above. The complete list of registered servers should be
possible to access routinely via for example HTTP and FTP so an
automatic update of whois proxies can be done on a regular basis.
Registrations of these whois servers is assumed to be taken care of
at the same time as a registry for a TLD is allocated, so the
procedures for registering and update information about Whois
servers should be migrated into the process of registering and
updating registries for TLDs.
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7. Security Considerations
The Whois protocol doesn't include any security functions at all,
and this paper doesn't add any such security features. Because of
this, information given back with these extensions, such as the
referal information, is not to be treated as accurate by any means.
The referal information can be, aswell as the rest of the output in
a Whois query, easilly forged by a third party. Because the output
is in pure text, it is possible to wrap some signing operation
around the output, such as via PGP. Specification of how this is
done is not discussed in this memo, but left for future studies. One
question might be whether the Whois server or the originating
authoritative source should be the one signing the data.
It is recommended that the transfer of information from the Whois
server operator to IANA (as stated in the IANA considerations
section) should be secured for example by the use of signed email,
to minimize the risk of IANA publishing information that is not from
an authoritative source. This is though a general issue for IANA, so
securing this listing service should be done in parallell with
securing all other listing services at IANA.
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References
[1] Harrenstien, K, Stahl, M and E Feinler, "NICNAME/WHOIS", RFC
954, October 1998.
Authors' Addresses
Patrik Faltstrom
Tele2
Borgarfjordsgatan 16
127 61 Kista
Sweden
EMail: paf@swip.net
URI: http://www.tele2.se
Mark Kosters
Network Solutions
Herndon
USA
EMail: markk@internic.net
URI: http://www.networksolutions.com
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Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved.
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Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
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