Internet DRAFT - draft-loffredo-regext-rdap-reverse-search
draft-loffredo-regext-rdap-reverse-search
Registration Protocols Extensions M. Loffredo
Internet-Draft M. Martinelli
Intended status: Standards Track IIT-CNR/Registro.it
Expires: August 4, 2019 January 31, 2019
Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) Reverse search capabilities
draft-loffredo-regext-rdap-reverse-search-04
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 as reverse search, respond to some needs not yet readily
fulfilled by the current Whois protocol, they have raised concerns
from two perspectives: server processing impact and data privacy.
Anyway, the impact of the reverse queries on RDAP servers processing
is the same as the standard searches and it can be reduced by
implementing policies to deal with large result sets, while data
privacy risks can be prevented by RDAP access control
functionalities. This document describes RDAP query extensions that
allow 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
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and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
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material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on August 4, 2019.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2019 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
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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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Implementation Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. JSON in URLs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Implementation Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. IIT-CNR/Registro.it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Privacy Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Appendix A. Change Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1. Introduction
Reverse Whois is a service provided by many web applications that
allow users to find domain names owned by an individual or a company
starting from the owner details, such as name and email. Even if it
has been considered useful for some legal purposes (e.g. uncovering
trademark infringements, detecting cybercrime cases), its
availability as a standardised Whois capability has been objected for
two main reasons, which now don't seem to conflict with an RDAP
implementation.
The first objection has been caused by the potential risks of privacy
violation. However, TLDs community is considering a new generation
of Registration Directory Services ([ICANN-RDS1],[ICANN-RDS2]), which
provide access to sensitive data under some permissible purposes and
according to adequate policies to enforce the requestor
accreditation, authentication, authorization, and terms and
conditions of data use. It is well known that such security policies
are not implemented in Whois ([RFC3912]), while they are in RDAP
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([RFC7481]). Therefore, RDAP permits a reverse search implementation
complying with privacy protection principles.
Another objection to the implementation of a reverse search
capability has been connected with its impact on server processing.
Since RDAP supports search queries, the impact of both standard and
reverse searches is equivalent and 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 restricting the result
set.
Reverse searches, such as finding the list of domain names associated
with 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 ([RFC5730]) updates
(e.g. 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 with 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 relation 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].
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2. RDAP Path Segment Specification
The new search paths are OPTIONAL extensions of path segments defined
in RFC 7482 ([RFC7482]). The search paths are:
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 (Figure 1) are the same as specified in paragraph Section 3.2.3
of RFC 7482 ([RFC7482]).
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 gTLD stakeholders
very useful to improve RDS searchability ([ICANN-RDS1], [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]).
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Searches for domains by related entity postal address are specified
using this form:
domains?entityAddr={"value":YYYY,"role":"ZZZZ"}
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 onto a DBMS
indexed field, the latter is mapped onto 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 as those related to 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
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some characters that are forbidden from appearing in a URL. Anyway,
escaping the invalid characters is not an issue because, on the
client side, modern browsers automatically encode URLs and, on the
server side, several URL encoding/decoding libraries for all web
development programming languages are available. The downside of URL
encoding is that it can make a pretty long URL, 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
maintains 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".
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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/
Description: This implementation includes support for RDAP queries
using data from the public test environment of .it ccTLD.
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. Privacy Considerations
The use of the capability described in this document SHOULD be
compliant with the rules about privacy protection each RDAP provider
is subject to. Sensitive registration data SHOULD be protected and
accessible for permissible purposes only. Therefore, it is
recommended that RDAP servers provide reverse search only to those
requestors who are authorized according to a lawful basis. Some
potential users of this capability include registrars searching for
their own domains and operators in the exercise of an official
authority or performing a specific task in the public interest that
is set out in law. Another scenario consists of permitting reverse
searches, which take into account only those entities that have
previously given the explicit consent for publishing and processing
their personal data.
6. Security Considerations
Security services required to provide controlled access to the
operations specified in this document are described in RFC 7481
([RFC7481]).
7. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
8. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge Scott Hollenbeck, Francisco
Arias, Gustavo Lozano and Eduardo Alvarez for their contribution to
this document.
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9. References
9.1. 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>.
[RFC5322] Resnick, P., Ed., "Internet Message Format", RFC 5322,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5322, October 2008,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5322>.
[RFC5730] Hollenbeck, S., "Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP)",
STD 69, RFC 5730, DOI 10.17487/RFC5730, August 2009,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5730>.
[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>.
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[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>.
9.2. 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>.
[ICANN-RDS1]
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>.
[ICANN-RDS2]
Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers,
"Final Issue Report on a Next-Generation gTLD RDS to
Replace WHOIS", October 2015,
<http://whois.icann.org/sites/default/files/files/
final-issue-report-next-generation-rds-07oct15-en.pdf>.
[JSURL] github.com, "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>.
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[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] github.com, "Rison - Compact Data in URIs", 2017,
<https://github.com/Nanonid/rison>.
[URLON] github.com, "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.
04: Revised some sentences in "Introduction" section. Added
"Privacy Considerations" 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
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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