[Freedombox-discuss] DHTs and Names

[bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:34:34PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> 
> Hi.  I'd like to understand how these human readable names that we're
> going to insert into a DHT are going to work from a security standpoint.
>
> What stops me from taking your name?  What stops me from taking names
> similar to yours?
> 
> I'm skeptical of the advisability of globally scoped non-hierarchically
> registered human readable names and would like to understand the service
> model and goals for this proposal.

I'm not sure someone will have a good answer to this question, as you
raise an issue that is for sure not that easy to solve (also called
nowadays the Zooko triangle).

You can find some resources on the page I creates yesterday:
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/DistributedNaming. Or maybe is because
of this page that you are asking?

I2p has an interesting way to solve this issue: it uses a pure DHT
(kadmelia) as a backend, and on top of that people use so called
"Adressbooks", which enable them to put "petnames" on entries of this DHT.
There is one global addressbook, but people can override it with their
local one. This personnal adressbooks can also be shared, so that you can
use the addressbook of a friend that is in your WOT and then call different
remotes the with the same name than your friend.

http://www.i2p2.de/naming.html and
http://www.i2p2.de/naming_discussion.html 

Seems like a lot of use believe that the DNS has too many issues that
conflict with FBX project, so an alternative naming scheme should be
investigated.

bert.