Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
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Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
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Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#2[deleted]
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#3I propose an implementation of these petnames by sharing directory access through mutually trusted brokers, whose identity is proven by certificates and whose location is discovered through a standardized directory service protocol. I think we can make huge strides by working with the ITU here — if we can convince them IP is the next big thing, then we might not end up being chained to the OSI netstack for the first release.
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#4I propose an implementation of these petnames by sharing directory access through mutually trusted brokers, whose identity is proven by certificates and whose location is discovered through a standardized directory service protocol. I think we can make huge strides by working with the ITU here — if we can convince them IP is the next big thing, then we might not end up being chained to the OSI netstack for the first…
Sarcastic replies can be fine. Sarcastic replies when you clearly didn't read the article are just annoying.
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#5There are some niceties here, but I think this is a little thin on the security aspects of the scheme: it's not clear how users establish the authenticity of transitively received petnames, for example.
More fundamentally, there's a factor outside of Zooko's triangle: trust isn't really transitive[1]. I trust my doctor and my doctor trusts their sibling, but I don't necessarily trust their sibling.
With that being said, I think there's a pretty rich research space here, and I think the edge/local aspects of this design are pretty interesting! I just hope we don't end up with a reinvention of historically insufficient web-of-trust architectures :-)
[1]: https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/4349/904849.p...
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#6I have crazy idea to produce mnemonic rules for every DID, maybe fancy-AI tech would help
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#7I think perhaps the PoW/PoS solution to byzantine generals (as used by Ethereum, for example) can and does solve the Zooko's triangle problem via things like ENS.
I don't anticipate that end users will be able to ingest or cope with the mental model involved with the correct usage of the system described in TFA.
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#8I have long been a fan of petnames, and graph naming systems in general.
I like to use the term “nickname” for what they call “edge names” in the article: a nickname is not as personal as a petname, it’s a name you share with others.
An interesting thing that the article sort of hints at is that these kinds of systems have a fairly smooth range of operating points between globally unique and centralized vs decentralized petnames. The article’s example of the bizdir local business directory is somewhere in between these extremes. It sort of turns Zooko’s triangle into more like a fan, where the “human friendly” point is fixed and there’s an arc describing the tradeoffs, from personal through local to global.
How can a petname system function at the global+centralized point, so it could replace the DNS? It needs to pass the “billboard test”: I type in a name I saw on a billboard and I get to the right place. (It might be a multipart name like a postal address or DNS name, with an extra “edge name” or two to provide enough disambiguating context.) I imagine that an operating system supplier might provide a few preconfigured petnames (well, it probably includes its own petname so the software can update itself securely), a lot like its preconfigured PKIX CA certificates. These petnames would refer to orgs like the “bizdir”, or Verisign, or Nominet, that act as nickname registries. Your collection of petnames is in effect your personal root zone, and the preconfigured petnames are in effect the default TLDs. There would inevitably be something like the CA/Browser forum to mediate between OS suppliers and nickname registries: a petname ICANN.
I wrote an older iteration of these ideas over a decade ago (https://dotat.at/@/2012-02-28-path-names-in-a-rootless-dns.h...). Those notes have a bit too much DNS braindamage, but I included some curious anti-DNS discussion: How you might make use of reaching names by multiple paths? What might it look like to have a shared context for names that is not global but is national or regional or local?
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#9There are some niceties here, but I think this is a little thin on the security aspects of the scheme: it's not clear how users establish the authenticity of transitively received petnames, for example. More fundamentally, there's a factor outside of Zooko's triangle: trust isn't really transitive[1]. I trust my doctor and my doctor trusts their sibling, but I don't necessarily trust their sibling. With that being sa…
There's an associated paper that goes through implementing a petname system in a simple chat application. Petnames compose well with object capability security.
https://files.spritely.institute/papers/implementation-of-pe...
Re: Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
#10I propose an implementation of these petnames by sharing directory access through mutually trusted brokers, whose identity is proven by certificates and whose location is discovered through a standardized directory service protocol. I think we can make huge strides by working with the ITU here — if we can convince them IP is the next big thing, then we might not end up being chained to the OSI netstack for the first…
Sarcastic replies can be fine. Sarcastic replies when you clearly didn't read the article are just annoying.
It’s proposing a decentralized naming scheme, with nearly zero implementation details, with the idea that it works like split-horizon dns plus some undefined form of list sharing. Adding a bunch of cryptographic stuff to it doesn’t really change the hard bits of discovery.