On 2012-02-28, Sai tor@saizai.com wrote:
Hello all.
We've written up our proposal for mnemonic .onion URLs.
See https://docs.google.com/document/d/sT5CulCVl0X5JeOv4W_wC_A/edit?disco=AAAAAE... for details; please read the full intro for explanations and caveats, as some are important.
I'm not going to follow that link. (Tor specification-change proposals are sent to the tor-dev mailing list in their entirety and copied into a Git repository for archival, not left on an easily-changed web page.)
tl;dr: It's a system that would have all three properties of being secure, distributed, and human-meaningful… but would *not* also have
We do not care whether names are ‘human-meaningful’. (“Tor” is not a human-meaningful name.)
We would like a naming system which provides *memorable* names, if that is possible. (I've never seen a distributed naming system which provides secure and memorable names.)
But we care even more about other usability properties of a naming system, such as how easily users can type a name given a copy of it on paper, how easily users can transfer a name to a friend over the telephone, and how easily users can compare two names maliciously crafted by an attacker with plausible computational power to be similar (whether in written form or in spoken form).
choice of name (though it has the required *canonicality* of names),
By proposing to add a new naming system for Tor's existing hidden service protocol, you are already assuming and claiming that hidden service names do not need to be canonical. Why do you think ‘canonicality’ is required?
and has a somewhat absurdist definition of 'meaningful'. :-P
Then your system's names are unlikely to be memorable.
Please feel free to put comments there or on list.
Right now we're at the stage just before implementation; namely, we haven't yet collated the necessary dictionaries, but we have a reasonably good idea of how the system would work, including needed constraints on the dictionaries. If you have suggestions or comments, now is a good time to talk about them, so that if any of it affects the dictionary collation step we don't waste work.
The dictionaries required by a dictionary-based naming system strongly influence whether the resulting names will be memorable. The usability tests which will prove that your scheme does not provide sufficient usability benefit to justify shipping many large dictionaries with Tor cannot begin until after you have collected the dictionaries.
Robert Ransom