In line with international standards, DENIC has made available a whois service for many years. This information service provides access to a variety of domain data and thus guarantees that whoever needs to can quickly find out whom to contact, if a .de domain causes technical problems or infringes rights. Duly taking account of the legitimate interests of data privacy, the service has been developed continuously. User data are protected and access is secured through access restrictions.

Last but not least because of the limited access, DENIC was asked to create a function in the whois that enables a domain holder to actively prove in a secure and easy manner that he/she actually is the holder of a .de domain.

DENIC has now complied with this request: As of 4 September 2012, the DENIC web-whois offers our customers the option to obtain in response to a whois query a signed output with a .de domain's holder data. Such signed whois output can be used to prove beyond doubt who was the holder of the domain name at the time when the query was made, for example, if the domain is planned to be sold or in case of matters of legal relevance.

The advantage of a query with signed information output is that the received data is reliable and unforgeable and that it bears a time stamp.

To ensure that a domain query is submitted by an authorized person and not by an automated script (bot), also the new expanded whois function is protected by a Captcha, which must be deciphered by the requester to get access to the domain holder data. To further improve security, the Captcha version introduced in 2009 was replaced by reCAPTCHA in the course of the current amendments.

You will find more detailed information about the new signed whois output and the exact procedure of signing and verifying domain data on our special information page.