WHOIS

WHOIS is a TCP-based query/response protocol which is widely used for querying a database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address, or an autonomous system number on the Internet. WHOIS lookups were traditionally made using a command line interface, but a number of simplified web-based tools now exist for looking up domain ownership details from different databases. Web-based WHOIS clients still rely on the WHOIS protocol to connect to a WHOIS server and do lookups, and command-line WHOIS clients are still quite widely used by system administrators.

The WHOIS system originated as a method that system administrators could use to look up information to contact other IP address or domain name administrators (almost like a "white pages"). The use of the data that is returned from query responses has evolved from those origins into a variety of both altruistic (such as a Certificate Authority validating the registration for ecommerce https) and nefarious uses (such as bulk unsolicited email campaigns).

WHOIS has a sister protocol standard called RWhois.

Thin and thick lookups

There are two ways that WHOIS information may be stored: thick or thin. With the thick model, one WHOIS server stores the WHOIS information from all the registrars for the particular set of data (so that one WHOIS server can respond with WHOIS information on all .org domains, for example). With the thin model, one WHOIS server stores the name of the WHOIS server of a registrar that has the full details on the data being looked up (such as the .com WHOIS servers, which refer the WHOIS query to the registrar that the domain was registered from). The thick model usually ensures consistent data and slightly faster lookups (since only one WHOIS server needs to be contacted).

If a WHOIS client does not understand the information being returned, the results of a thin lookup (which include the WHOIS server of the registrar, and perhaps a few other necessary details) will be displayed to the end user. If the WHOIS client understood how to deal with this situation, it would display the full information from the registrar. Unfortunately, there is no standard in the WHOIS protocol for determining how to distinguish the thin model from the thick model.

Exact implementation of which records are stored varies between domain name registries. Some top-level domains, including .com and .net, operate a thin WHOIS, allowing the various domain registrars the ability to maintain their own customers' data. Other registries, including .org, operate a thick model.

Example query

Below is the result of a WHOIS query on wikipedia.org:

Domain ID:D51687756-LROR Domain Name:WIKIPEDIA.ORG Created On:13-Jan-2001 00:12:14 UTC Last Updated On:01-Mar-2006 12:39:33 UTC Expiration Date:13-Jan-2015 00:12:14 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:Go Daddy Software, Inc. (R91-LROR) Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED Status:CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED Registrant ID:GODA-09495921 Registrant Name:Wikimedia Foundation Registrant Organization:Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Registrant Street1:204 37th Ave N, #330 Registrant Street2: Registrant Street3: Registrant City:St. Petersburg Registrant State/Province:Florida Registrant Postal Code:33704 Registrant Country:US Registrant Phone:+1.7272310101 Registrant Phone Ext.: Registrant FAX: Registrant FAX Ext.: Registrant Email:noc@wikimedia.org Admin ID:GODA-29495921 Admin Name:Jimmy Wales Admin Organization:Wikimedia Foundation Admin Street1:204 37th Ave. N. #330 Admin Street2: Admin Street3: Admin City:St. Petersburg Admin State/Province:Florida Admin Postal Code:33704 Admin Country:US Admin Phone:+1.7276441636 Admin Phone Ext.: Admin FAX: Admin FAX Ext.: Admin Email:jwales@bomis.com Tech ID:GODA-19495921 Tech Name:Jason Richey Tech Organization:Wikimedia Foundation Tech Street1:19589 Oneida Rd. Tech Street2: Tech Street3: Tech City:Apple Valley Tech State/Province:California Tech Postal Code:92307 Tech Country:US Tech Phone:+1.7604869194 Tech Phone Ext.: Tech FAX: Tech FAX Ext.: Tech Email:jasonr@bomis.com Name Server:NS0.WIKIMEDIA.ORG Name Server:NS1.WIKIMEDIA.ORG Name Server:NS2.WIKIMEDIA.ORG

History

When the Internet was emerging out of the ARPANET entity, there was only one organization that handled all domain registrations, which was DARPA itself. The process of registration was established in RFC 920. WHOIS was standardized in the early 1980s to look-up domains, people and other resources related domain and number registrations. Because all registration was done by one organization in that time, one centralized server was used for WHOIS queries. This made looking-up information very easy.

Early WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. You could do a WHOIS lookup on a person's last name and get all the individual people who had a registered handle. You could do a query on a keyword and see all registered domains containing that keyword. You could even query a given administrative contact and see all domains they were associated with. Due to the advent of the commercialized Internet, multiple registrars and unethical spammers, such permissive searching is no longer available.

Initially, while ARPANET faded away in the late 1980s, responsibility of domain registration remained with DARPA. UUNet began offering domain registration service, however they simply handled the paperwork for you and still had to deal with DARPA's Network Information Center (NIC). Then the National Science Foundation directed that management of Internet domain registration would be handled by commercial, 3rd party entities. InterNIC was formed in 1993 under contract with the NSF, consisting of Network Solutions, Inc., General Atomics, and AT&T. General Atomics' contract was cancelled after several years due to performance issues.

On December 1, 1999, management of .com, .net, and .org was turned over to ICANN and these popular TLDs were switched to a thin WHOIS model. Existing WHOIS clients stopped working at that time. A month later it had self-detecting CGI support so that the same program could operate a web-based WHOIS lookup, and an external TLD table to support multiple whois servers based on the TLD of the request. This eventually became the model of the modern whois client.

Currently, in 2005, there are many more generic top-level domains than there were in the early 1980s. There are also many, many more country-code top-level domains. This has led to a complex network of domain name registrars and registrar associations, especially as the management of Internet infrastructure has become more internationalized. As such, performing a WHOIS query on a domain requires knowing the correct, authoritative WHOIS server to use. Tools to do WHOIS proxy searches have become common, and there's a command-line whois client (jwhois) which uses a configuration file to map-out domain names and network blocks to their appropriate registrar.

In 2004, an IETF committee was formed to standardize a whole new way to look-up information on domain names and network numbers. The current working name for this proposed new standard is Cross Registry Information Service Protocol (CRISP).

Querying WHOIS servers

Command-line clients

Originally the only method by which a WHOIS server could be contacted was to use a command line interface text client. In most cases this was on a Unix or Unix-like platform. The WHOIS client software was (and still is) distributed as open source. Various commercial Unix implementations may use their own implementations (for example, Sun Solaris 7 has a WHOIS client authored by Sun).

A WHOIS command line client typically has options to choose which host to connect to for whois queries, with a default whois server being compiled in. Additional options may allow control of what port to connect on, displaying additional debugging data, or changing recursion/referral behavior.

Like most TCP/IP client/server applications, a WHOIS client takes the user input and then opens an IP socket to its destination server. The WHOIS protocol is used to establish a connection on the appropriate port and send the query. The client waits for a response from the server, which it then either returns to the end-user or uses to make additional queries. Much more detailed information on the WHOIS protocol can be found in the RFCs.

Graphical clients

The term "graphical client" may be a bit of a misnomer for a WHOIS client, since all the data to be derived from a WHOIS server is plain text, and the protocol is a relatively static one. There is not much interaction to do with a WHOIS server. In this context, the term "graphical client" is taken to mean a WHOIS client that runs as an application on a GUI OS and uses the OS's standard GUI for user interaction.

Web based clients

With the advent of the World Wide Web and especially the loosening up of the Network Solutions monopoly, looking up WHOIS information via the web has become quite common. Most early web-based WHOIS clients were merely front-ends to a command-line client, where the resulting output just got displayed on a webpage with little, if any, clean-up or formatting.

Nowadays, web based WHOIS clients usually perform the WHOIS queries directly and then format the results for display. Many such clients are proprietary, authored by domain name registrars such as Go Daddy or Network Solutions.

The need for web-based clients came from the fact that command-line WHOIS clients largely existed only in the Unix and large computing worlds. Microsoft Windows and Macintosh computers had no WHOIS clients, so registrars had to find a way to provide access to WHOIS data for potential customers. Many end-users still rely on such clients, even though command line and graphical clients exist now for most home PC platforms.

Perl modules

CPAN has several Perl modules available that work with WHOIS servers. Many of them are not current and do not fully function with the current (2005) WHOIS server infrastructure. However, there is still much useful functionality to derive including looking up AS numbers and registrant contacts.

Problems

Privacy: Registrant's contact details, such as address and telephone number, are made easily accessible to anyone over the internet for most top-level domains. Although some registrars offer private registrations (where the contact information of the registrar is shown), this sometimes means that the registrar is the legal owner (leasor) of the domain.
False registrations: The privacy services mentioned above are often abused by people involved in illegal activity, who use them in the knowledge that it makes it extremely difficult for entities (even law-enforcement officers) outside of their registrar's legal jurisdiction to obtain their contact details. The fact that some registrars are uncooperative when notified of illegal activity makes this situation somewhat worse.
Inaccuracy of information: Some registrars are not sufficiently careful to ensure the accuracy of contact details listed in the WHOIS.
Obsolescence: most of the information stored in a WHOIS server, is subject to change later in time. For instance, owners' contact details become obsolete after geographical moves, while the email address used to administrate the domain remains (unfortunately!) valid, hence not urging the owner to update the file, if (s)he ever does.
History: when a domain record is updated (move, sold..), the previous information is not archived but overridden. Few WHOIS web servers, however, do automatically monitor and cache the records for domains which were queried through their interface, making the WHOIS history partially available.
Spam: Spammers often harvest plain-text email addresses from WHOIS requests. This means that both WHOIS servers and websites offering WHOIS lookups have resorted to special systems (such as Captcha, where users have to type in letters or numbers from a picture) and rate-limiting systems.
Internationalization: The WHOIS protocol was not written with an international audience in mind. A WHOIS server cannot tell which text encoding it is using for either the requests or replies, and the servers were originally all simply using US-ASCII, although this cannot be assumed anymore with international servers. This obviously will impact the usability of the WHOIS protocol in countries outside the USA, especially as internationalized domain names are falling into wider use. A user can (and possibly will have to due to this limitation) use punycode, but this leads to conversion problems as the punycode system is not easy for a regular user to grasp.
Lack of WHOIS server lists: There is no central list of WHOIS servers. Therefore, people writing WHOIS tools need to find their own list of WHOIS servers, and different WHOIS tools may contact different WHOIS servers.
Different registrars' WHOIS servers return results in different formats, making automation of parsing WHOIS data difficult. While such automation has many legitimate uses (primarily for ISPs), it also lends itself to use by spammers and other people acting unethically.

External links

Request For Comments (Internet standards specifications)

RFC812, NICNAME/WHOIS (1982, obsolete)
RFC954, NICNAME/WHOIS (1985, obsolete)
RFC3912, WHOIS protocol specification (2004, current)
Complete list of RFCs about whois

Internet protocols | Internet standards

Gourt Home::Gourt :: WHOIS