Network Working Group L. Daigle, Editor Internet-Draft VeriSign, Inc. Expires: December 12, 2003 June 13, 2003 WHOIS Protocol Specification draft-daigle-rfc954bis-00.txt Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. 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." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on December 12, 2003. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document updates the specification of the WHOIS protocol, thereby obsoleting RFC954 [1]. The update is intended to remove the material from RFC954 that does not have to do with the on-the-wire protocol, and is no longer applicable in today's Internet. This document does not attempt to change or update the protocol per se, or document other uses of the protocol that have come into existence since the publication of RFC954. 1. Introduction WHOIS is a TCP-based transaction-oriented query/response protocol that is widely used to provide information services to Internet Daigle, Editor Expires December 12, 2003 [Page 1] Internet-Draft draft-daigle-rfc954bis-00 June 2003 users. While originally used to provide "white pages" services and information about registered domain names, current deployments cover a much broader range of information services. The protocol delivers its content in a human-readable format. For historic reasons, WHOIS lacks many of the protocol design attributes, for example internationalisation and strong security, that would be expected from any recently-designed IETF protocol. This document does not attempt to rectify any of those short comings. Instead, this document merely documents the WHOIS protocol as it is. In some areas, this document does document particular well known shortcomings of the WHOIS protocol. The discussion of possible protocols to carry out these functions, with updated capabilities to address the short comings, is being addressed in a separate IETF activitiy (CRISP Working Group). 2. Protocol Specification A WHOIS server listens on TCP port 43 for requests from WHOIS clients. The WHOIS client makes a text request in US-ASCII format to the WHOIS server, then the WHOIS server replies with US-ASCII text content. All requests are terminated with ASCII CR and then ASCII LF. The response might contain more than one line of text, so the presence of ASCII CR or ASCII LF characters does not indicate the end of the response. The WHOIS server closes its connection as soon as the output is finished. The closed TCP connection is the indication to the client that the response has been received. 3. Protocol Example If one places a request of the WHOIS server located at whois.nic.mil for information about "Smith", the packets on the wire will look like: client server at whois.nic.mil open TCP ---- (SYN) ------------------------------> <---- (SYN+ACK) ------------------------- send query ---- "Smith" --------------------> get answer <---- "Info about Smith" --------- <---- "More info about Smith" ---- close <---- (FIN) ------------------------------ ----- (FIN) -----------------------------> Daigle, Editor Expires December 12, 2003 [Page 2] Internet-Draft draft-daigle-rfc954bis-00 June 2003 4. Internationalisation The WHOIS protocol has not been internationalised. The WHOIS protocol has no mechanism for indicating the character set in use, but instead assumes that all users are using US-ASCII. In practice, some WHOIS servers, particularly those outside the USA, might happen to be using some other character set either for requests, replies, or both. This can adversely impact the usefulness of the WHOIS protocol. 5. Security Considerations The WHOIS protocol has no provisions for strong security. WHOIS lacks mechanisms for access control, integrity, and confidentiality. Accordingly, WHOIS-based services should only be used for information which is non-sensitive and intended to be accessible to everyone. The absence of such security mechanisms means this protocol would not normally be acceptable to the IETF at the time of this writing. 6. Acknowledgements Ran Atkinson prepared the earlier versions of this document. References [1] Harrenstien, K., Stahl, M. and E. Feinler, "NICNAME/WHOIS", RFC 954, October 1985. [2] Harrenstien, K. and V. White, "NICNAME/WHOIS", RFC 812, March 1982. [3] Harrenstien, K., "NAME/FINGER Protocol", RFC 742, December 1977. Author's Address Leslie Daigle, Editor VeriSign, Inc. 21355 Ridgetop Circle Dulles, VA 20166 US EMail: leslie@verisignlabs.com; leslie@thinkingcat.com Daigle, Editor Expires December 12, 2003 [Page 3] Internet-Draft draft-daigle-rfc954bis-00 June 2003 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved. This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. 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Acknowledgement Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the Internet Society. Daigle, Editor Expires December 12, 2003 [Page 4]