[Rt4-whois] IRD protocol development at IETF

Wed May 2 04:07:14 UTC 2012

Dear All,

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area, with
the following draft charter (see
http://www.ietf.org/iesg/evaluation/weirds-charter.txt), and is provided for
informational purposes only. Kindly note that current draft proposes way
forward using RESTful framework for both names and numbers and also the
timelines are Aug. 2013 for the completion of drafts.

Regards,
Sarmad

Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service (weirds)

----------------------------------------------------------

Status: Proposed Working Group

Last updated: 2012-04-24

Chairs:

    TBD

Applications Area Directors:

    Barry Leiba<barryleiba at computer.org>

    Pete Resnick<presnick at qualcomm.com>

Mailing List: 

 Address:   weirds at ietf.org

 To Subscribe:    https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds

 Archive:   http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/weirds/

Description of Working Group:

Internet registries for both number resources and names have historically
maintained a lookup service to permit public access to some portion of the
registry database.  Most registries offer the service via WHOIS (RFC 3912),
with additional services being offered via world wide web pages, bulk
downloads, and other services, such as RPSL (RFC 2622).

WHOIS has never been internationalized.  In the absence of formal
specification, ad hoc solutions to signal internationalized registration
data have been adopted and deployed.  Providing a standards-based solution
that scales well could minimize further proliferation of ad hoc solutions.

WHOIS also has no data model: replies are basically just free-form text.
This means that processing of WHOIS output amounts to "screen scraping",
with specialized handlers for every service.

While many of the domain name registries share a basic common output format,
the addition of data elements changes the output and causes problems for
parsers of the data.

The WHOIS protocol does not offer any differential service; it cannot
differentiate among clients to offer different subsets of information or to
allow different access rates to it.

Various attempts to solve the limitations of WHOIS have met with mixed
success.  The most recent of these was IRIS (RFC 3891).

IRIS has not been a successful replacement for WHOIS.  The primary technical
reason for this appears to be the complexity of IRIS, the fact that it
builds upon many available technologies that in the aggregate form a complex
system. There may also exist non-technical reasons, but they lie in areas
upon which the IETF does not pass judgement.

In recent years, ARIN and RIPE NCC have fielded production RESTful web
services to serve WHOIS 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 purpose of this
working group is to broaden the use of RESTful web services by achieving
simple and common URI patterns and responses amenable to all number resource
and domain name registries.

This Working Group shall determine the general needs of such a service, and
standardize a single data framework.  That framework shall be used to
encapsulate objects that could form part of an answer.  The framework shall
be for data to be delivered via a RESTful data service using HTTP
(optionally using TLS), and may use standard features of HTTP to support
differential service levels to different classes of user. The data shall
have one mandatory format, though the working group may consider other
optional formats.

The overall effort will be broadly aligned with a subset of the Cross
Registry Internet Service Protocol (CRISP) Requirements (RFC 3707), but with
the explicit additional goals of producing a simple, easy-to-implement
protocol, supporting internationalized registration data and, specifically
for name registries, capturing the needs of internationalized domain names
in the data model.

As the number registries have more experience with these services and have
found common ground, with their dissimilarities resulting in more complete
working group input documents, the goals of the working group are to produce
standards-track specifications for both number and name registries using the
fashion and pattern of the number registry input documents,
draft-newton-et-al-weirds-rir-query and
draft-newton-et-al-weirds-rir-json-response, as an initial basis.

Work to specify the query for domain name registration data will be based on
draft-sheng-weirds-icann-rws-dnrd.

The Working Group shall determine the general requirements of such a
service, using draft-kucherawy-weirds-requirements as an input document, and
standardize a single data framework.  The working group will likely not seek
publication of this draft.

Should the Working Group reach a point where it determines that the problem
of producing a grand unified specification for both numbers and names
appears to be intractable, it will be permitted to divide the problem into
separate tasks and amend its milestones accordingly.

Milestones:

Nov 2012  Draft specifying the common infrastructure document to the

          IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard.

Feb 2013  Draft specifying the RESTful URL query format for RIRs to the

          IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard.

Mar 2013  Draft specifying the format for responses to RIR queries

          to the IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard.

Jul 2013  Draft specifying the RESTful URL query format for domain name

          registration data to the IESG for approval as a Proposed

          Standard.

Aug 2013  Draft(s) specifying the format(s) for responses to domain name

          registration data queries to the IESG for approval as a

          Proposed Standard.

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