[db-wg] NWI-11 Internationalised Domain Names

Dear Colleagues,

Here is the impact analysis for the NWI-11 implementation.

The Database team plans to implement NWI-11 as per the Solution Definition:
https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/db-wg/2020-June/006525.html

(1) Impact to Whois Update

The implementation will automatically apply Punycode encoding (as per RFC 5891) to the domain part of an email address during Whois update. 

The encoding is only applied to an IDN domain name, and changes the current behaviour as follows:
	- ASCII encoded values will not be affected (as before).
	- Non-ASCII but latin-1 encoded values will be encoded as Punycode.
	- Non-latin-1 encoded values (e.g. UTF-8) will also be encoded as Punycode. These values previously were transformed to latin-1, with a '?' substitution.

The local part of an email address must only contain ASCII characters. If non-ASCII characters are found in the local part, the address is rejected as invalid.

This change will only affect attributes with an email address syntax (i.e. abuse-mailbox, e-mail, irt-nfy, mnt-nfy, notify, ref-nfy, upd-to).

If an email address is converted to Punycode, a warning will be included in the update response.

Any Punycode conversion failure will result in the attribute value being rejected as invalid. A workaround in this case is to encode the value before submitting the update.

(2) Impact to Whois Query

When querying the RIPE database, any Punycode encoded email address is returned as-is (i.e it is not decoded).

(3) Impact to Existing Data

We will perform a cleanup to convert any existing non-ASCII (but latin-1 encoded) IDN domain names to Punycode in attributes with an email address syntax. This affects very few objects. The maintainer(s) will be notified by email beforehand.

(4) Impact to Whois Documentation

We will update the database documentation with details of this behaviour change.

(5) Release Timeline

We expect the NWI-11 implementation to take about 1 month (including code changes and testing), and will include the feature in the Whois 1.98 release.

As usual, we will deploy the release to the Release Candidate environment for 2 weeks before production, to allow for testing.

Regards
Ed Shryane
RIPE NCC



> On 23 Jul 2020, at 12:00, ripedenis at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> 
> Hi Ed
> 
> The chairs see there is a consensus to move forward with implementing Punycode. Can you present an impact analysis explaining what changes you propose, what effect those changes will have on updates and queries (by all the different methods), if anyone needs to modify their software interacting with the database.
> 
> cheers
> denis
> 
> co-chair DB-WG

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