Dear Team Members,

Dave Piscitello, Andy Newton, Steve Sheng, and Benedetto Fiorelli published an article on RESTful at USENIX.ORG that we thought might interest you.

A RESTful Web Service for Internet Name and Address Directory Services http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2011-10/openpdfs/Newton.pdf

Dave's executive summary is posted at:

A RESTful Web Service for Domain Name and IP Directory Services http://securityskeptic.typepad.com/the-security-skeptic/2011/10/a-restful-web-service-for-domain-name-and-ip-directory-services.html

And here's some additional background, courtesy of Dave.

Inspired by the Whois-RWS service now in production at the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), staff at ICANN began experimenting with Representational State Transfer-based (REST) Web services for domain name registration data (a.k.a., "Whois data"), as did engineers at the RIPE Network Coordination Centre. ICANN, ARIN, and RIPE staff recently published an article in USENIX ;login to share their findings from this experimentation. The article describes three implementations in sufficient detail to illustrate the benefits and corroborate their findings. Specifically, through these implementations, ICANN, ARIN, and RIPE staff demonstrate that REST-based directory services are able to "support internationalized registration data (and, generally, structured and typed data), provide unambiguous signaling, and improve error reporting . We are able to leverage existing client and server infrastructures and provide security services, including transport confidentiality and integrity checking, authentication, and data filtering, in an extensible manner, again with the prospect of being able to leverage implementations and Web infrastructure that makes use of security services today.