INTERNET-DRAFT M. Yevstifeyev, Ed. Intended Status: Standards Track May 13, 2011 Obsoletes: 3912 (if approved) Expires: November 14, 2011 WHOIS Protocol Specification draft-yevstifeyev-whois-rfc3912bis-00 Abstract This document is a specification of the WHOIS protocol. It obsoletes and supersedes RFC 3912. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. 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/1id-abstracts.html The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html Copyright and License Notice Copyright (c) 2011 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 to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of Yevstifeyev Expires November 14, 2011 [Page 1] INTERNET DRAFT WHOIS Protocol Specification May 13, 2011 the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1. Referral Whois (RWhois) et al. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2. Lack of Protocol Design Attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Protocol Specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. WHOIS Servers Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.1. Server Names Aliases under whois-servers.net . . . . . . . 4 3.2. Use of DNS SRV Record . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.3. WHOIS Lookup at whois.iana.org . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Appendix A. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1. Introduction WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase "who is") is an application-layer (Layer 7 in Open Systems Interconnection Basic Reference Model [OSI]), TCP-based, query-and-response protocol used to provide information services to Internet users. Initially, WHOIS protocol was intended to be used to obtain information about the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system. Yet, current implementations cover a much broader range of information services. WHOIS protocol is designed to deliver information in human-readable form. WHOIS protocol was initially specified in RFC 812 [RFC0812], that has been obsoleted by RFC 954 [RFC0954] and, then, RFC 3912 [RFC3912], that is the most current specification. This document supersedes RFC 3912; it also requests to move RFC 812 and RFC 954 to Historic status, per RFC 2026 [RFC2026]. This document also updates the registration of TCP well-known port 43, used by WHOIS. 1.1. Referral Whois (RWhois) et al. Referral Whois (RWhois) is an extension to WHOIS protocol designed to extend its concepts in a scalable, hierarchical fashion, creating a system with a tree-like architecture. RFC 1714 [RFC1714] defined Yevstifeyev Expires November 14, 2011 [Page 2] INTERNET DRAFT WHOIS Protocol Specification May 13, 2011 version 1.0 of RWhois, whereas the most current specification - RFC 2167 [RFC2167] - documents RWhois 1.5. Visit these documents for architectural and technical description of this protocol. There were also another WHOIS extension deployed - WHOIS++. RFC 1835 [RFC1835] serves as a specification for it. Currently, WHOIS++ protocol is considered to be deprecated; its specification bears Historic status. 1.2. Lack of Protocol Design Attributes For historic reasons, WHOIS lacks many of the protocol design attributes, for example internationalization and strong security, that would be expected from any recently-designed IETF protocol. This document does not attempt to rectify any of those shortcomings. Instead, this memo documents the WHOIS protocol as it is. 2. Protocol Specification WHOIS server listens for incoming connections on TCP well-known port 43. WHOIS client establishes TCP connection [RFC0793] on the aforementioned port and then sends a text request to the WHOIS server. The request is a single line of ASCII [ASCII] text, terminated by CRLF - carriage return (ASCII character 0x0D) followed by line feed (ASCII character 0x0A). The WHOIS request is described using ABNF [RFC5234] in the rule below: whois-request = 1*VCHAR CRLF where and are specified in Appendix B.1 of RFC 5234. The semantics of the request is that it contains data identifying what information should be sent back in response to it. After WHOIS server has received a request, it sends back a response, that might contain one or more lines of ASCII text, each of them terminated by CRLF (thus, CRLF does not indicate the end of response). WHOIS response is described in ABNF rule below: whois-response = 1*(1*VCHAR CRLF) where and are specified in Appendix B.1 of RFC 5234. The semantics of the response is that it contains information about what has been requested in the request. As soon as WHOIS server has sent all lines of its response, it closes TCP connection. Yevstifeyev Expires November 14, 2011 [Page 3] INTERNET DRAFT WHOIS Protocol Specification May 13, 2011 3. WHOIS Servers Discovery Currently, there are three common ways of discovery of WHOIS servers; however, none of them are considered to be a standard preferred way. 3.1. Server Names Aliases under whois-servers.net whois-servers.net provides DNS alias records for top-level domains (TLD) [RFC1591] WHOIS servers in the form of .whois-servers.net, where is a TLD name. Therefore "us.whois-servers.net" is an alias for "whois.nic.us". 3.2. Use of DNS SRV Record DNS SRV record [RFC2782] may be used to advertise WHOIS servers, where part of the record is equal to "nicname", is equal to "tcp" and the containing some TLD name. An example of such DNS record is: _nicname._tcp.us 86400 IN SRV 0 5 43 whois.nic.us. 3.3. WHOIS Lookup at whois.iana.org IANA currently maintains the server - whois.iana.org - that provides information on each TLD (sent to it as a request), including the WHOIS server. Ie., the WHOIS response to the request containing "com" will return information about the com domain name authority; the address of WHOIS server will also appear in the response. 4. 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. 5. IANA Considerations IANA is asked to update the registration of TCP well-known port 43 with a reference to this document. IANA has also been maintaining the whois.iana.org server (see Section 3.3); this document makes no request concerning it. Yevstifeyev Expires November 14, 2011 [Page 4] INTERNET DRAFT WHOIS Protocol Specification May 13, 2011 6. References 6.1. Normative References [ASCII] American National Standards Institute (ANSI), "Coded Character Set - 7-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange", ANSI X3.4, 1968. [RFC0793] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7, RFC 793, September 1981. [RFC5234] Crocker, D., Ed., and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234, January 2008. 6.2. Informative References [OSI] International Organization for Standardization (ISO), "Information technology - Open Systems Interconnection - Basic Reference Model: The Basic Model," ISO/IEC 7498-1, November 1994. [RFC0812] Harrenstien, K. and V. White, "NICNAME/WHOIS", RFC 812, March 1982. Obsoleted by RFC0954, RFC3912. [RFC0954] Harrenstien, K., Stahl, M., and E. Feinler, "NICNAME/WHOIS", RFC 954, October 1985. Obsoleted by RFC3912. [RFC1591] Postel, J., "Domain Name System Structure and Delegation", RFC 1591, March 1994. [RFC1714] Williamson, S. and M. Kosters, "Referral Whois Protocol (RWhois)", RFC 1714, November 1994. Obsoleted by RFC2167. [RFC1835] Deutsch, P., Schoultz, R., Faltstrom, P., and C. Weider, "Architecture of the WHOIS++ service", RFC 1835, August 1995. [RFC2167] Williamson, S., Kosters, M., Blacka, D., Singh, J., and K. Zeilstra, "Referral Whois (RWhois) Protocol V1.5", RFC 2167, June 1997. [RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996. [RFC2782] Gulbrandsen, A., Vixie, P., and L. Esibov, "A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)", RFC 2782, Yevstifeyev Expires November 14, 2011 [Page 5] INTERNET DRAFT WHOIS Protocol Specification May 13, 2011 February 2000. [RFC3912] Daigle, L., "WHOIS Protocol Specification", RFC 3912, September 2004. Appendix A. Acknowledgments Ken Harrenstien, Vic White, Mary Stahl, Elizabeth Feinler and Leslie Daigle authored of the predecessors of this document - RFC 812, RFC 954 and RFC 3912. This document reuses some text from RFC 3912. Authors' Addresses Mykyta Yevstifeyev (editor) 8 Kuzovkov St., flat 25 Kotovsk Ukraine EMail: evnikita2@gmail.com Yevstifeyev Expires November 14, 2011 [Page 6]