Mike Hearn <[email protected]> writes: >> >> GNS has really nice features, but like any other cryptographic system I >> think >> the hard part is how to make it easy to use. >>
Indeed. GNS is a fun project :) Looking forward to see how GNUNet will use it. > Yes, GNS seems to hit problems at this point in the paper: > > "Bob gets to know Alice in real life and obtains her public key" > > >> The web usage of most non-nerds around me is that if they want to go to >> facebook >> for example, even though they visit it every day several times, they type >> in the >> search engine (usually google) 'facebook' and follow what the search engine >> dictates what is facebook. > > > Funny fact - one of the top searches on Google is "yahoo" and one of the > top searches on Yahoo is "google". Or at least it used to be. People > navigate to search engines using search engines too. And why not? A search > engine is miles better than a URL bar for ordinary users. It does spelling > correction, understands non-English alphabets, and doesn't force you to > think about the distinction between an address and what you actually want. > Most importantly, it *always* works and never gives you mysterious errors. > Good points :) > W.R.T. the utility of censorship free naming, I'm not sure a naming only > system is actually that useful. DNS is already decentralised across all > countries. Sites that have hit DNS censorship in the past have basically > always been successful at playing jurisdictional arbitrage. For something > like GNS to be useful you'd need a web site that can't get a domain name in > any country or TLD, presumably due to illegality (what else can cause > this?), yet doesn't mind exposing its IP address in the clear. > > In practice, sites that face such across the board levels of censorship > i.e. Silk Road and friends all need to hide their server location as well, > in which case they end up just using Tor for everything including naming. FWIW, Tor has also been planning to use a similar key blinding scheme for HS names. This is done so that HSDirs can't harvest the names of published or requested HSes. You can read more about it here: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/224-rend-spec-ng.txt#l1635 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8106 And for those of you who enjoy provable security, you can find a sequence-of-games proof here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-December/005943.html Of course, from a quick skim of the paper, GNS is much more than a query privacy scheme. For example, I wonder if Tor could use the petname system of GNS to help make HS names human-memorable. .oO(But does that mean that another DHT needs to be added to the protocol? Need to read the paper properly...) _______________________________________________ Messaging mailing list [email protected] https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging
