RDAP Deployment Findings and Update
draft-blanchet-regext-rdap-deployfindings-04

Abstract

Registration Access Data Protocol(RDAP) is being deployed in domain and IP address registries. This document describes issues and findings while interfacing with the known server implementations and deployments. It also provides recommendations for the specifications.

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 December 15, 2019.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2019 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 (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. IANA RDAP Registries Related Issues
• 2.1. Values not Registered or Similar
• 2.1.1. Registry Entity
• 2.2. RDAP Extensions not Registered
• 3. RDAP Responses
• 3.1. Cross-origin resource sharing(CORS)
• 3.2. Object Class Name empty
• 3.3. Links Relation Values
• 3.4. Related link pointing to self causes infinite loop
• 3.5. Link without rel
• 3.6. Registrant Entity Too Deep
• 4. Queries
• 4.1. URL encoding of :
• 5. Domain Registrar RDAP Server Location
• 6. Issues related to RFC7482
• 6.1. Search patterns that are not
• 7. IANA RDAP Bootstrap Registries Related Issues
• 7.1. Missing Trailing Char in Bootstrap Registries
• 7.2. Single target value
• 8. Security Considerations
• 9. IANA Considerations
• 10. Acknowledgements
• 11. References
• 11.1. Normative References
• 11.2. Informative References
• Author's Address

1. Introduction

While developing various tools and software related to RDAP, issues have been found and are documented below. This document should help in writing future version of the specifications and provide better conformant deployment. It is split in various sections based on where the fix should be applied. Obviously, there are different levels of severity of the issues, including nits or very minor. The actual instances and organisations running the RDAP servers where the issues were found are not listed.

2. IANA RDAP Registries Related Issues

This section describes issues related to the IANA non-Bootstrap registries as specified in [RFC7483].

2.1. Values not Registered or Similar

The IANA RDAP JSON Values registry contains various values expected in JSON responses. The following table shows values not registered in the registry but seen in the field. The second column shows the possible corresponding values already registered.

Recommendation: implementations should replace their custom values with the registered ones, when one exist. Implementors should register their values when there is no corresponding registered one.

Remarks Type

Event Action

Status Value

Role Value

2.1.1. Registry Entity

The (domain or IP) registry itself is currently not modeled in entities in RDAP. In an whois query for a TLD itself, the Remarks contains the URL of the registry entity (for registration information) and the whois entry of the registry is returned. In RDAP context, the RDAP server URL of the TLD registry should also be returned. Therefore, IANA RDAP server should send this data for the TLDs as part of its RDAP response. These semantics are currently not modeled.

This document proposes that RDAP servers may send an entity with role "registry" in the top-level of the RDAP response. This entity would have embedded [links] to its web server ("rel": "self", "type": "text/html") and rdap server ("rel": "self", "type": "application/rdap+json").

IANA Action: add a new row "registry", "role" to the RDAP JSON Values registry.

2.2. RDAP Extensions not Registered

The IANA RDAP Extensions registry contains various extensions values expected in RDAP JSON responses in the rdapCconformance member. It is our understanding from [RFC7483] section 4.1 and [RFC7480] section 8.1 that only the prefix of the extension (i.e. "rdap_ObjectTag"), not the whole string ("rdap_objectTag_level_0"), need to be registered in the IANA registry. However, some entries in the IANA RDAP extensions registry seem to imply a 0 version as part of the registered value.

The following table shows values seen in the field in the first column, corresponding prefix (guessed as there is no normalized delimiter) in the second column and if the prefix is registered in IANA registry in the third column.

This registry may end up listing all names of all registries if each one has his own extension. Moreover, there is no normalized delimiter of the prefix in the full string, which may not help the RDAP client to parse and interpret correctly. As with [RFC6350], we may instead use the First Come First Serve(FCFS) private enterprise numbers (PEN) registry to automatically have an organisation prefix defined without creating another set of org names within this registry and have the delimiter be "_" following the PEN.

Recommendation (short term): implementations should replace their custom values with the registered ones, when one exist. Implementors should register their values when there is no corresponding registered one.

3. RDAP Responses

This section discusses issues found related to RDAP responses, specified in [RFC7483].

3.1. Cross-origin resource sharing(CORS)

As specified in [RFC7480], the HTTP "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" header should be included in the responses, to enable Web clients to work properly. Some RDAP servers do not set this header. RFC7480 says "it is RECOMMENDED that servers". It should be updated to "for any public Internet deployment, servers MUST".

3.2. Object Class Name empty

{
  entities: [
   {
   "entities": [
     {
     "objectClassName": "",
     "handle": "",
     }
   ],
 ],
}

A non-conformant server sends the following answer, where the value of "objectClassName" is an empty string (as well as "handle" also empty). As per [RFC7483] section 4.9, this "objectClassName" value is required. Extract of the seen response:

3.3. Links Relation Values

The links relation values as specified in [RFC7483] section 4.3 refer to [RFC5988] which creates the IANA Link Relations registry. This registry contains a large number of values where most of them do not apply to the RDAP deployment. As seen with other values above that are similar to registered ones but not used, we list here the ones we have seen. It would be appropriate to further describes the main ones in the RFC so implementors focus on ones that are expected instead of picking the wrong ones in the IANA registry or to define new ones and do not register them.

Links Relation Values Seen

As shown in the table, an implementation put an URL as the value of the "rel", instead of an actual registered value.

3.4. Related link pointing to self causes infinite loop

{
  "links": [
    {
    "title": "Self",
    "rel": "self",
    "type": "application/rdap+json",
    "href": "https://rdapserver.example.com/domain/example.net"
    },
    {
    "title": "Registrar Data for this object",
    "rel": "related",
    "href": "https://rdapserver.example.com/domain/example.net",
    "type": "application/rdap+json"
    }
  ],
}

An RDAP server returns a link of "rel": "related" is pointing to itself, therefore causing the RDAP client to fetch the object again, then read the related link and then fetch again, creating an infinite loop. Extract of the seen response:

3.5. Link without rel

{
"links": [
  {
   title: "My Corporation",
   href: "http://mycorp.mytld"
   }
],
}

An RDAP server returns a link with no "rel" property, so the client parser has no clue what is this data and what to do with it. Extract of the seen response:

3.6. Registrant Entity Too Deep

{
 entities: [ 
  { 
    "objectClassName": "entity",
    "handle": "HANDLE1",
    "roles": [ "abuse" ], 
    "vcardArray": [ ... ],
    "entities": [
       {
       "objectClassName": "entity",
       "handle": "HANDLE2",
       "roles": [ "registrant" ], 
       "vcardArray": [ ... ],
       }
    ],
],

{
 entities: [
  { 
    "objectClassName": "entity",
    "handle": "HANDLE1",
    "roles": [ "abuse" ],
    "vcardArray": [ ... ]
  },
  {
    "objectClassName": "entity",
    "handle": "HANDLE2",
    "roles": [ "registrant" ],
    "vcardArray": [ ... ],
  }
],

An RDAP server returns the registrant entity in a subentity, which makes difficult to parse given the expectation is the registrant would be at the top level. Extract of the seen response:

4. Queries

This section talks about support of RFC7482 queries and the RDAP server behaviors seen.

4.1. URL encoding of :

For RIR registries, the ip query may include an IPv6 address which then includes one or many ":". Clients may decide to do percent-encoding of the query. In one RDAP server, the server rejected the percent-encoded query of an IPv6 address. For example, https://rdapserver.example.com/ip/2001%3Adb8%3A0%3A%3A/48 is rejected, while https://rdapserver.example.com/ip/2001:db8:0::/48 is accepted.

Recommendation: accept both percent-encoded queries or non-percent encoded queries.

5. Domain Registrar RDAP Server Location

The ICANN RDAP Profile section 3.2 requires the domain registries who do not have registrant information (so-called thin registries) to put a specific link of "rel": "related" pointing to the domain registrar responsible for the domain being queried, so that a client can get the registrant information using a second query to the related link. However, the semantics seems ambiguous as other RDAP servers may use the "rel": "related" for other related means, but not the specific semantic of finding the registrant data. Therefore, a possible mitigation is to define a new "rel" type of "registrantInfo" (mnemonic TBD) to carry the specific semantic of registrant info.

6. Issues related to RFC7482

6.1. Search patterns that are not

Section 3.2.1 of [RFC7482] says: "domains?nsIp=ZZZZ. ZZZZ is a search pattern representing an IPv4 [RFC1166] or IPv6 [RFC5952] address.". Search pattern has been used throughout the document as something that can include ‘*’, while here, it does not. The syntax statement is also misleading. Similarly, section 3.2.2 says: "nameservers?ip=YYYY YYYY is a search pattern representing an IPv4 [RFC1166] or IPv6 [RFC5952] address."

Recommendation: in [RFC7482], replace: "ZZZZ is a search pattern representing an IPv4" by "ZZZZ is an IPv4", "Syntax: domains?nsIp=<domain search pattern>" by "Syntax: domains?nsIp=<nameserver IP address>", "YYYY is a search pattern representing an IPv4" by "YYYY is an IPv4", "Syntax: nameservers?ip=<nameserver search pattern>" by "Syntax: nameservers?ip=<nameserver IP address>"

7. IANA RDAP Bootstrap Registries Related Issues

This section describes issues related to the IANA Bootstrap registries as specified in [RFC7484].

7.1. Missing Trailing Char in Bootstrap Registries

[RFC7484] section 3 says: "Base RDAP URLs MUST have a trailing "/" character". However, some values in the various IANA Bootstrap registries do not have the trailing "/" character. These should be added to provide consistency.

7.2. Single target value

[RFC7484] provides a way to list multiple RDAP servers for an entry. This flexibility was designed initially to support multiple URI types, such as http: and https, and to provide some level of redundancy. However, given that security deployment policy is to use https everywhere and redundancy can be accomplished in other ways, deployment has shown that all entries in all bootstrap registries have a single target RDAP URL value. Therefore, we can consider updating the RFC to provide only one target value. However, this should be done carefully to avoid breaking current deployed clients.

8. Security Considerations

Proper conformance to specifications helps security. However, no security issues have been found in the context of this draft.

9. IANA Considerations

This document request IANA to add the following values to this registry. TBD. See 'IANA Action:' within the document.

10. Acknowledgements

Audric Schiltknecht, Mario Loffredo, Justin Mack have provided input and suggestions to this document.

11. References

11.1. Normative References

11.2. Informative References

Author's Address