[tor-dev] Naming Systems wiki page

[Jeremy Rand]

Jesse V:
> On 09/27/2016 02:27 AM, Jeremy Rand wrote:
>> Hello!  I just had a chance to look through the latest state of the wiki
>> page (thanks to everyone who's been expanding it).  I've added several
>> items to the security properties and drawbacks sections of Namecoin, and
>> made a few trivial corrections; hopefully none of them are
>> controversial.  (If anyone thinks I made a mistake, please let me know.)
>>
>> I notice that kernelcorn added an item to the "drawbacks" section of
>> Namecoin, which says "Hard to authenticate names."  It's not entirely
>> clear to me what is meant by this item, so it's hard for me to evaluate
>> its accuracy.
>>
>> Any chance Jesse could elaborate on this?
> 
> My mistake. I was thinking about authenticating the RSA keys with
> Namecoin's ECC keys, but after further thought this is not a proper
> criticism so I have removed it.

Thanks.

> Since you're checking factual accuracy of the items in the wiki, you can
> find the OnioNS pre-print here:
> https://github.com/Jesse-V/OnioNS-literature/raw/master/conference/conference.pdf

Ah, excellent, some reading material!  Much appreciated, I'll read
through that when I next catch a break.  I'm quite curious to see how
things have evolved since I last checked out OnioNS in any detail (which
would have been about a year ago, I guess).

>> PS: Happy to see that OnioNS is still being worked on -- I think it's
>> great to have more of the solution space explored and more options
>> available, regardless of the fact that OnioNS and Namecoin could be
>> considered competitors.  We're all in this together, and I'd love to see
>> both OnioNS and Namecoin succeed.  :)
> 
> Namecoin is the closest competitor. They are very different designs of
> course. In any event, naming systems should become more desirable once
> proposal 224 is deployed.

Yes, 224 seems to be making systems like OnioNS and Namecoin quite a bit
more urgently useful.

> I'm also competing with OnionBalance now since OnioNS supports basic
> load-balancing at the name level. :)

Namecoin also can be used for name-level load balancing, although I
haven't really carefully considered the anonymity effects of the load
balancing (e.g. does it open the risk of fingerprinting?), so that
feature is lower priority until I can think about that more carefully.
I'm curious how OnioNS is handling that -- maybe there's some thinking
in OnioNS's design that's adaptable to Namecoin?

Cheers,
-Jeremy


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