On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 12:11:37AM -0400, Griffin Boyce wrote:
Matthew Finkel matthew.finkel@gmail.com wrote:
So I think we should make some terms clear (just for the sake of clarity). We have, I guess, three different naming-system ideas floating here: petnames, (distibuted) namecoin-ish, and centralized consensus-based - rough summary.
Some months ago, the petname system interested me enough that I started to write a proposal for it. At this point, it's wound up in bitrot. Though I'd spent a bit of time working on it, there was no comprehensive way to accomplish it.
I too started writing a petname proposal only to have it wind up on the backburner.
In a nutshell, there would be a sort of pseudo-DNS that allow a given .onion to define a petname through a file on their site. For example, somename.onion/petname.txt could shorten the address to bettername.pet. The pseudo-DNS would check if a hidden service is alive once every few days, and if the onion is down for thirty days, the petname is freed up for someone else to use. This has the side effect of promoting good onion upkeep.
This could work well. Have you seen proposals/ideas/xxx-onion-nyms.txt in torspec? It's a similar idea but targeted for use with tor2web.
This isn't a petname system system, but it would be a step in the right direction for making HS more user friendly. I worry about the initial race condition for this type of system. How do we guarantee that the site resolving to "torproject" is torproject.org. It's this expectation that the mapping is obvious that will be the difficult part of the system. After 6 months (or so) the naming will stabilize and be (mostly) consistent month-to-month, but how do we guarantee that a malicious actor is not able to register popular internet domains (torproject, ddg, etc) before the legitimate/honest actor?
I like the idea of federating hidden services and eepsites into one petname system, but not sure how possible/practical that would be. Of course, there's really nothing keeping an independent actor from making this and offering it as a firefox plugin for those who might want to use it.
I know very little about eepsites, but as long as the guarantees provided by eepsites and HS are equivalent regarding security and anonymity, this is an interesting idea. The easiest/obvious way to accomplish this is to have gateways/peering-points between the two networks, I need to refresh my memory/read more about I2P/eepSites before I can argue a valid mechanism.
Unless, are you talking about running I2P and Tor on the same computer/network and being able use the same naming scheme to connect to both eepSites and Hidden Services? If so, a petname system is perfect for this because it is completely user defined. See Waterken's Petname Tool[0] for an example of such an addon. If a modified version of this add-on (or something similar) is included in TBB/"secure-browser" and not only remembers the websites you trust but also allows you to use your petname in-place-of the real name, then this would be a possibly-useful system.
Thoughts?
~Griffin
Technical Program Associate, Open Technology Institute #Foucault / PGP: 0xAE792C97 / OTR: saint@jabber.ccc.de
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
- Matt