1. TLS Channel for RIPE Whois
A Proposal by Martin Millnert
Presented by Shane Kerr
at RIPE 62 in Amsterdam, May 2011

2. Proposal: TLS for Whois Data
TLS is Transport Layer Security (similar to SSL)
A TLS channel would provide:
Confidentiality of queries
Data integrity of the transported data
Source data integrity (with server certificate)
No additional changes to the RIPE database.

3. Why not a RESTful API? Several RIR's have new database API's:
ARIN-RWS is a RESTful API
RIPE NCC has the RIPE Database API
TLS is simple
TSL offers compatibility with the existing Whois protocol
NOC's / ISPs scripts, for example

4. Details Port 43 (WHOIS) over TLS on port T.B.D.
Port 21 (FTP) over SSL on port 443

5. Example Implementation: Non-TLS
import socket import sys query = bytes(' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) + "\r\n", 'ascii') sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET6, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.connect(('whois.ripe.net', 43)) sock.send(query) answer = sock.recv(4096) while answer != b'': sys.stdout.write(answer.decode('ascii')) answer = sock.recv(4096)

6. Example Implementation: TLS
import socket import sys import ssl query = bytes(' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) + "\r\n", 'ascii') sock = ssl.wrap_socket(socket.socket(socket.AF_INET6, socket.SOCK_STREAM)) sock.connect(('whois.ripe.net', 43434)) sock.send(query) answer = sock.recv(4096) while answer != b'': sys.stdout.write(answer.decode('ascii')) answer = sock.recv(4096)