Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) Reverse search capabilities
draft-loffredo-regext-rdap-reverse-search-03
The information below is for an old version of the document.
| Document | Type |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Authors | Mario Loffredo , Maurizio Martinelli | ||
| Last updated | 2018-10-16 | ||
| Replaced by | draft-ietf-regext-rdap-reverse-search, draft-ietf-regext-rdap-reverse-search | ||
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draft-loffredo-regext-rdap-reverse-search-03
Registration Protocols Extensions M. Loffredo
Internet-Draft M. Martinelli
Intended status: Standards Track IIT-CNR/Registro.it
Expires: April 19, 2019 October 16, 2018
Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) Reverse search capabilities
draft-loffredo-regext-rdap-reverse-search-03
Abstract
The Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) does not include query
capabilities to find the list of domains related to a set of entities
matching a given search pattern. Even if such capabilities, commonly
referred to as reverse search, respond to some needs not yet readily
fulfilled by the current Whois protocol, they have raised concern
from two perspectives: server processing impact and data privacy.
Anyway, the impact of the reverse queries on RDAP servers processing
is the same of the standard searches and it can be reduced by
implementing policies to deal with big result sets, while data
privacy risks can be mitigated by RDAP access control
functionalities. This document describes RDAP query extensions that
allows clients to request a reverse search based on the domains-
entities relationship.
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 https://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 April 19, 2019.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2018 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(https://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
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Conventions Used in This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. RDAP Path Segment Specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Implementation Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. JSON in URLs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Implementation Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. IIT-CNR/Registro.it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Appendix A. Change Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1. Introduction
Reverse Whois is a service provided by many web applications that
allows users to find domain names owned by an individual person or
company starting from the owner details (like name, email). Even if
the availability of this service might raise some objections due to
potential privacy risks, ICANN itself, in its report about Next-Gen
Registration Directory Service (RDS) [ICANN-RDS], states that it is
allowed when driven by some permissible purposes (e.g. legal actions,
criminal investigations) and if it provides adequate policies to
enforce the requestor accreditation, authentication, authorization,
and terms and conditions of data use.
It is well known that such policies are not implemented in Whois
[RFC3912], while they are in RDAP. In fact, RDAP relies on security
features, available in the HTTP protocol, to support access control
based on local policy [RFC7481].
Another objection to the implementation of Reverse Whois is connected
with its impact on server processing. Since RDAP supports search
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queries, the impact of both standard and reverse searches can be
mitigated by servers adopting ad hoc strategies. Furthermore,
reverse search is almost always performed by specifying an entity
role (e.g. registrant, technical contact) and this can contribute to
restrict the result set.
Reverse searches, such as finding the list of domain names associated
to contacts, nameservers or DNSSEC keys, may be useful to registrars
as well. Usually, registries adopt out-of-band mechanisms to provide
results to registrars asking for reverse searches on their domains.
Possible reasons of such requests are:
o the loss of synchronization between the registrar database and the
registry database;
o the need of such data to perform massive EPP updates (i.e.
changing the contacts of a set of domains, etc.).
Currently, RDAP does not provide any way for a client to search for
the collection of domains associated to an entity [RFC7482]. A query
(lookup or search) on domains can return the array of entities
related to a domain with different roles (registrant, registrar,
administrative, technical, reseller, etc.), but the reverse operation
is not allowed. Only reverse searches to find the collection of
domains related to a nameserver (ldhName or ip) can be requested.
Since entities can be in relationship with all RDAP objects
[RFC7483], the availability of a reverse search can be common to all
RDAP query paths.
The protocol described in this specification aims to extend the RDAP
query capabilities to enable reverse search based on the domains-
entities relationship (the classic Reverse Whois scenario). The
extension is implemented by adding new path segments (i.e. search
paths) and using a RESTful web service [REST]. The service is
implemented using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [RFC7230]
and the conventions described in RFC 7480 [RFC7480].
1.1. Conventions Used in This Document
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 [RFC2119].
2. RDAP Path Segment Specification
The new search paths are OPTIONAL extensions of path segments defined
in RFC 7482 [RFC7482]. The search paths are:
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Syntax: domains?entityHandle=<reverse search pattern>
Syntax: domains?entityFn=<reverse search pattern>
Syntax: domains?entityEmail=<reverse search pattern>
Syntax: domains?entityAddr=<reverse search pattern>
The reverse search pattern is a JSON [RFC8259] object including two
members: "value" and "role". The "value" member represents the
search pattern to be applied to the corresponding entity field and
can be a JSON type primitive or object. The "role" member is a
string whose possible values are those detailed in Section 10.2.4 of
RFC 7483 [RFC7483]. The former is REQUIRED while the latter is
OPTIONAL to allow RDAP servers to provide reverse search capabilities
without specifying any role.
The search patterns corresponding to the "value" in the first two
cases are the same as specified in paragraph Section 3.2.3 of RFC
7482 [RFC7482] (Figure 1).
domains?entityHandle={"value":"CID-40*","role":"registrant"}
domains?entityFn={"value":"Bobby*","role":"registrant"}
Figure 1: Examples of RDAP queries to find all domains related to a
registrant whose handle matches "CID-40*" and whose formatted name
matches "Bobby*"
The last two reverse searches are considered by ICANN very useful to
improve searchability capabilities of the Registry Directory Services
([ICANN-RDS], [ICANN-RA]).
Searches for domains by related entity email are specified using this
form:
domains?entityEmail={"value":"XXXX","role":"ZZZZ"}
where XXXX is a search pattern representing an email address as
defined in RFC 5322 [RFC5322].
Searches for domains by related entity postal address are specified
using this form:
domains?entityAddr={"value":YYYY,"role":"ZZZZ"}
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where YYYY is a JSON object containing the information described in
Section 2.4 of RFC 5733 [RFC5733], respectively: "street", "city",
"sp", "pc" and "cc" (Figure 2). All the members of the postal
address object are OPTIONAL but at least one is REQUIRED. The
constraints on the members are implicitly joined by AND.
domains?entityAddr={"value":{"cc":"CA","city":"Sydney"},"role":"registrant"}
Figure 2: Example of a RDAP query to find all domains related to a
registrant whose postal address contains the country code equals to
"CA" and the city equals to "Sydney"
3. Implementation Considerations
The implementation of the proposed extension is technically feasible.
The search paths "handle" and "fn" are used as standard paths to
search for entities. With regards to the last two reverse searches,
both email and postal address information are usually required by the
registries but, while the former is usually mapped on a DBMS indexed
field, the latter is mapped on a combination of non-indexed fields.
As a consequence while the former should not significantly decrease
the performance, the latter might have an impact on server
processing. Anyway, this impact is evaluated to be the same as other
query capabilities already presented in RDAP (e.g. wildcard prefixed
search pattern) so the risks to generate huge result sets are the
same existing for the other standard searches and can be mitigated by
adopting the same policies (e.g. restricting search functionalities,
limiting the rate of search requests according to the user profile,
truncating and paging the results, returning partial responses).
3.1. JSON in URLs
Many web services, including RDAP, rely on the HTTP GET method to
take advantage from some of its features:
o GET requests can be cached;
o GET requests remain in the browser history;
o GET requests can be bookmarked.
Sometimes it happens that such advantages should be combined with the
requirement to pass objects and arrays in the query string. JSON is
the best candidate as data interchange format but it contains some
characters that are forbidden from appearing in a URL. Anyway,
escaping the invalid characters is not an issue because, on client
side, modern browsers automatically encode URLs and, on server side,
a lot of URL encoding/decoding libraries for all web development
programming languages are available. The downside of URL encoding is
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that it can make a URL rather long which, depending on the initial
length and the number of invalid characters, might exceed the
practical limit of web browsers (i.e. 2,000 characters).
Other solutions to pass a JSON expression in a URL could be:
o converting JSON to Base64 ([RFC4648]) but binary data are
unreadable;
o using a JSON variation that complies with URL specifications and
mantains readability like Rison ([RISON]), URLON ([URLON]) or
JSURL ([JSURL]).
The extensions proposed in this document rely on URL encoding because
it is widely supported and the risk to exceed the maximum URL length
is considered to be very unlikely in RDAP.
4. Implementation Status
NOTE: Please remove this section and the reference to RFC 7942 prior
to publication as an RFC.
This section records the status of known implementations of the
protocol defined by this specification at the time of posting of this
Internet-Draft, and is based on a proposal described in RFC 7942
[RFC7942]. The description of implementations in this section is
intended to assist the IETF in its decision processes in progressing
drafts to RFCs. Please note that the listing of any individual
implementation here does not imply endorsement by the IETF.
Furthermore, no effort has been spent to verify the information
presented here that was supplied by IETF contributors. This is not
intended as, and must not be construed to be, a catalog of available
implementations or their features. Readers are advised to note that
other implementations may exist.
According to RFC 7942, "this will allow reviewers and working groups
to assign due consideration to documents that have the benefit of
running code, which may serve as evidence of valuable experimentation
and feedback that have made the implemented protocols more mature.
It is up to the individual working groups to use this information as
they see fit".
4.1. IIT-CNR/Registro.it
Responsible Organization: Institute of Informatics and Telematics
of National Research Council (IIT-CNR)/Registro.it
Location: https://rdap.pubtest.nic.it/
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Description: This implementation includes support for RDAP queries
using data from the public test environment of .it ccTLD. The
RDAP server does not implement any security policy because data
returned by this server are only for experimental testing
purposes.
Level of Maturity: This is a "proof of concept" research
implementation.
Coverage: This implementation includes all of the features
described in this specification.
Contact Information: Mario Loffredo, mario.loffredo@iit.cnr.it
5. Security Considerations
Security services for the operations specified in this document are
described in RFC 7481 [RFC7481]. It is quite easy to imagine that,
in order to be compliant with ICANN recommendations about its use,
RDAP servers will provide reverse search, like other query
capabilities, only to restricted communities. One realistic scenario
for servers is to provide reverse search only for registrars
searching for their own domains. Another one is to prevent users to
start a reverse search from a registrant detail, by removing
"registrant" from the possible "role" values.
6. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
7. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge Scott Hollenbeck, Francisco
Arias, Gustavo Lozano and Eduardo Alvarez for their contribution to
this document.
8. References
8.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC3912] Daigle, L., "WHOIS Protocol Specification", RFC 3912,
DOI 10.17487/RFC3912, September 2004,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3912>.
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[RFC5733] Hollenbeck, S., "Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP)
Contact Mapping", STD 69, RFC 5733, DOI 10.17487/RFC5733,
August 2009, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5733>.
[RFC7230] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing",
RFC 7230, DOI 10.17487/RFC7230, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7230>.
[RFC7480] Newton, A., Ellacott, B., and N. Kong, "HTTP Usage in the
Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP)", RFC 7480,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7480, March 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7480>.
[RFC7481] Hollenbeck, S. and N. Kong, "Security Services for the
Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP)", RFC 7481,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7481, March 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7481>.
[RFC7482] Newton, A. and S. Hollenbeck, "Registration Data Access
Protocol (RDAP) Query Format", RFC 7482,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7482, March 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7482>.
[RFC7483] Newton, A. and S. Hollenbeck, "JSON Responses for the
Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP)", RFC 7483,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7483, March 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7483>.
[RFC8259] Bray, T., Ed., "The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data
Interchange Format", STD 90, RFC 8259,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8259, December 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8259>.
8.2. Informative References
[ICANN-RA]
Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers,
"Registry Agreement", July 2017,
<https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/
agreements/agreement-approved-31jul17-en.pdf>.
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[ICANN-RDS]
Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers,
"Final Report from the Expert Working Group on gTLD
Directory Services: A Next-Generation Registration
Directory Service (RDS)", June 2014,
<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/
final-report-06jun14-en.pdf>.
[JSURL] "JSURL", 2016, <https://github.com/Sage/jsurl>.
[REST] Fielding, R., "Architectural Styles and the Design of
Network-based Software Architectures", 2000,
<http://www.restapitutorial.com/media/
RESTful_Best_Practices-v1_1.pdf>.
[RFC4648] Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
Encodings", RFC 4648, DOI 10.17487/RFC4648, October 2006,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4648>.
[RFC7942] Sheffer, Y. and A. Farrel, "Improving Awareness of Running
Code: The Implementation Status Section", BCP 205,
RFC 7942, DOI 10.17487/RFC7942, July 2016,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7942>.
[RISON] "Rison - Compact Data in URIs", 2017,
<https://github.com/Nanonid/rison>.
[URLON] "URL Object Notation", 2017,
<https://github.com/cerebral/urlon>.
Appendix A. Change Log
00: Initial version.
01: Revised some sentences and references.
02: Added "entityEmail" and "entityAddr" path segments. Removed
"entityRole" path segment. Revised "Acknowledgements" section
03: Added "JSON in URLs" section
Authors' Addresses
Mario Loffredo
IIT-CNR/Registro.it
Via Moruzzi,1
Pisa 56124
IT
Email: mario.loffredo@iit.cnr.it
URI: http://www.iit.cnr.it
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Maurizio Martinelli
IIT-CNR/Registro.it
Via Moruzzi,1
Pisa 56124
IT
Email: maurizio.martinelli@iit.cnr.it
URI: http://www.iit.cnr.it
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