The initial problem statement that prompted this work was the need to identify and define relationships between domains. After boiling down the requirements, it quickly became clear that the simplest solution would also be incredibly flexible and support a lot of useful information about domains, the companies that operate them, and their brands they support.
This section includes a selection of use cases that extend beyond the simple solution designed to define domain relationships and showcases the vast possibilities the model supports. Once there's a simple mechanism for publishing and retrieving arbitrary policies for related domains... the type of information the policies can contain is nearly boundless.
With that in mind, these use cases are designed to illustrate the extensibility of the model beyond the simplistic examples mentioned earlier. Not all of these use cases must be supported for the model to succeed, and this proposal assumes that only a small subset of them will be useful for a vast majority of users. The goal of this section is to point out the breadth of utility available once the basic mechanism is adopted.
Many (most?) large companies with subsidiary brand/marketing/product domains operate a single primary domain that represents the administrative corporate parent. When a relying party encounters a domain, it may be interested in learning what domain acts as their administrative parent.
Possibly one of the simplest DRPF use cases is in protecting parked domains that the company explicitly declares as being inactive. Sometimes the domains are parked when registered for future use, while others are domains that have been retired from service, and others are registered to keep them away from malicious actors abusing them.
There is support for the ability of both the delegator of a subdomain and the target delegate to publish assertion records as DNS TXT RRs directly as well as within an attribute leaf domain label.
Companies often register domains operated by different divisions than the administrator of the primary corporate domain. The ability to clearly identify the relationships between the domains is key to signaling their utility.
Vendors will often register and operate domains on behalf of their customers. DRPF policies can help to clarify the relationship between the domain operated by a vendor, and related domains operated by the customer.
In addition to identifying domain relationships, the DRPF enables companies to publish official corporate and operational information for easy, verifiable discovery.
Defining administrative relationships between the brands operated by a conglomerate.
Identifying vendors, suppliers, and other authorized business relationships.
Publishing official business and operational information for easy, verifiable discovery.
The DRPF is being developed by an ad-hoc group of collaborators. If you have any questions about the work, feel free to send us an email and we'll endeavor to respond.