[anti-abuse-wg] Abuse Contact Information - Policy Proposal

Hi,

>> 4.1 Institute a mandatory reference to an IRT object in inetnum, 
>>     inet6num and aut-num objects.
> 
> So it seems to me that one particular problem is that the
> abuse-mailbox data is not available in the bulk database dumps,
> and neither are the IRT objects.

I fully agree with the description of the problem. The biggest problem
is, that RIPE is not telling their members which is the right way to
publish abuse contact information and not telling them that they have to
publish those information. And I disagree completely the opinion of not
having any mandatory email addresses in the whois information. IMHO as
long as an IP address can be abused, there must be a point of contact.

The second problem is the query restriction. RIPE has more than 2
million inet(6)nums and it is absolutely impossible to query for the
single IP addresses. Even with caching it is absolutely not possible.

The idea to offer an abuse finder
(http://labs.ripe.net/content/abuse-finder) is good and we will try that
out soon.


> Wouldn't it be easier if RIPE created person/role object dumps,
> containing only the nic-hdl and the abuse-mailbox field?  IRT object
> dumps would make a lot of sense, too.

I think RIPE shuts down the Bulk Data Service because of Privacy issues.
So that might not be the right way.

> Historically, IRT objects had significant organizational overhead and
> have been subject to politics, so I'm not sure if they are the proper
> answer.

I know, but IMHO it does not make sense to create something new again.

The mandatory IRT Object would solve almost all of those problems.
Why is that?

If you create an IRT Object with an abuse-mailbox attribute you can
query the range or the single address with the "-b" flag which is not
query restricted as far as RIPE told me.

Use the Example of IRT-MCI-NL (whois -h whois.ripe.net IRT-MCI-NL)

They have an abuse-mailbox attribute.

So I can query:
whois -h whois.ripe.net 193.67.0.0/16 -b
whois -h whois.ripe.net 193.67.0.1 -b
whois -h whois.ripe.net IRT-MCI-NL -b
whois -h whois.ripe.net ASXXXX -b (would be possible I guess)

and I always get back the abuse-mailbox attribute.

That way everybody can build a caching system, that uses all the IRT
Object found in the split files and connects them to the found
abuse-mailbox attributes.

And the second pro argument is, that the IRT Object allows to publish an
e-mail attribute for personal communication.

The query restriction forces us to send messages to the wrong contact,
because we are not able to get the subdelegation contact because of the
query restrictions.


The arguments against are clear as well. So the decision must be done by
RIPE and their members. APNIC did the decision and they will go online
with the mandatory IRT Object in November.


At the end I would be even happy if RIPE could agree on a Best Practice
Paper which tells their members to use the IRT Object in the explained
way to offer abuse contact information and stops creating of
abuse-mailbox attributes in non IRT-Objects. With a Best Practice like
that, everybody could easily reference on that without getting in
discussions about the right way of doing it.


Thanks,

Tobias