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Internet-Draft Ben Golightly
Expires: May 23 2016 20 November 2015


A Method for Verification of Domain Name Ownership
draft-bsag-domain-ownership-00

Abstract

This document defines a method for website administrators to verify
ownership of a domain name to third party service providers.

1. Status of this Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current
Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-
Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as
"work in progress."

Comments are solicited and should be addressed to the working
group's mailing list and/or the author(s).

This Internet-Draft will expire on May 23, 2016.

2. Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document.

3. Introduction

Website administrators are often required to verify ownership of
a domain name to a third party service provider. This verification
process may form a part of access control, privacy control, or
security and fraud prevention more generally.

Examples:

* a webmaster may verify their ownership of a domain with a search
engine in order to change how the website is displayed in search,
diagnose issues, and access search analytics.

* a digital Certificate Authority issuing an SSL certificate will
verify domain name ownership to prevent a "man in the middle"
attacker from being able to act as an imposter when intercepting
HTTPS connections to the targeted domain name.

To date, there is no standard way to do this. The service provider
will normally specify a method such as:

* Adding a vendor-specific meta tag to the home page of the website
accessible at the given domain, or more generally add some specific
HTML to the website.

* Uploading a HTML file with a specific file name and content to
the root directory of the website accessible at the given domain.

* Modifying the DNS records for the domain.

* Emails sent to a specific administrator e-mail address for a
domain.

Domain names expire or change ownership. Therefore, these methods of
verification must be permanently maintained by the website
administrator and regularly checked by the service provider.

These vendor-specific HTML files are often cryptically named, and
clutter the root directory of a website.

The method specified in this memo allows website administrators to
simplify webserver and domain name maintanence by centralising
verification information, and allows service providers to streamline
the verification process by avoiding vendor-specific verification
methods.

4. Specification

This memo specifies a format for encoding domain name verification
information provided by a service provider, and a method for
retrieving this information. Service providers may retrieve this
information and treat it as current evidence of domain ownership.

4.1 Access method

The verification information must be accessible via HTTP from the
domain requiring verification, under a standard relative path on the
server: "/verify.txt".

For convenience this resource may be referred to as a "verify.txt
file", though the resource need in fact not originate from a file-
system.

This file must be served with a MIME Type of "text/plain". The
character encoding must be UTF-8.

4.2 File Format Description

The format consists of a list of records, separated by blank lines
and comment lines.

A comment line takes the form:

#

Each record takes the form:

[]

For example:

# verify.txt example
example.org ExampleServiceProvider1 exampleAccountId-1234
example.org ExampleServiceProvider1 exampleAccountId-5678
example.com ExampleServiceProvider2 example-ABCDEF
example.com ExampleServiceProvider3
testing.example.com Example4 v=1;u=123;d=20150102

4.2.1 The Domain field

One webserver may be accessible from several different domain names.
The Domain field identifies to which domain name the verification
record applies.

The content of the domain field must be any validly formatted domain
name or IP address.

4.2.2 The ServiceProvider field

This is a field identifying the service provider requiring the
verification. There is no restriction on the format of this field,
except that it may not contain whitespace. Service providers should
pick descriptive names that uniquely identify an organisation or
service. This could be the URL of the service.

The length of this field should not exceed 256 bytes.

4.2.3 The value field

This is an optional field containing a value assigned by the service
provider. This may be used, for example, to associate a specific
account with the service provider with the verified domain. There
is no restriction on the format of this field, except that it may
not contain whitespace.

The length of this field should not exceed 4096 bytes.

4.3 Interoperability

Service providers should be liberal in accepting files with different
end-of-line conventions, specifically CR and LF in addition to CRLF.

With the exception of line breaks, service providers should ignore
whitespace except as a separator between fields in a record.

5. Security Considerations

Website administrators should prevent unauthorised users from
creating verify.txt files at the root of any domain (including
subdomains).

Website administrators should be cautious of the verify.txt file
being maliciously modified, and used to verify unauthorised users
to service providers. Website administrators should use appropriate
best practice, such as audited source control, to detect and trace
modifications.

Service providers are encouraged to place limits on the resources
spent on processing verify.txt files.

Service providers should be aware that domain names expire or change
ownership, and take steps to reverify as appropriate.

Service providers should be aware that, as with any verification
method, it may be possible for a user to impersonate a domain
administrator. The required strength of verification should be
balanced against the desired ease of verification.

6. IANA Considerations

This document has no actions for IANA.

7. Author's Address

Ben Golightly
Tawesoft Ltd
Email: ben@tawesoft.co.uk