[freenet-chat] ideas for a freenet 'name server' framework

[David McNab]

Hi

I've been thinking about ways to get human-friendly, yet secure, URIs
under freenet.

(KSKs are nice, just a shame they're so easily subverted).

My thoughts so far are:

1) Users would trust one or more 'namesites'. For instance, if I have
confidence in Alice's 'namesite', I would stick in my ~/.freenames file
an entry:

alice freenet:USK at alicepubkey/alice/0

2) If I want to browse a freesite, with the human-friendly URL of
http://falun-gong.free, my client would look in ~/.freenames, see the
entry for 'alice', then try alice's uri for 'falun-gong'.

3) If the 'alice' namesite has an entry for 'falun-gong', then the URI:

USK at alicepubkey/alice/0/falun-gong

should return the physical URI of the 'falun-gong' site I'm looking for,
which might be:

USK at falungpubkey/falun-gong/0

4) Alice might trust other namesites, so her namesite would have
a file 'USK at alicepubkey/alice/0/.forward

which lists URIs for other namesites which Alice considers trustworthy.
So if Alice didn't have an entry for 'falun-gong', maybe one of the
namesites listed in her .forward file might.

So, how would this get used in practice?

One way I've thought of is to implement a basic name server for local
use only. This name server would have a very simple socket interface,
supporting commands like 'lookup' (look up a name), 'list' (list the
trusted namesites), 'add' (add a namesite), 'remove' (remove a namesite).

Then the last step is to write an http proxy over the top of fproxy
which simply follows the above method to translate human-readable URIs
such as 'http://falun-gong.free' to
'http://127.0.0.1:8888/USK@falungongpubkey/falun-gong/0/index.html'

As for the service side, running a namesite would be very easy. It would
just be a freesite where the mapping from (say) foo.free is implemented
as a relative path /foo, which contains just the real freenet URI
'USK at blahblah/foo/0'.

An alternative, which would reduce the number of files on the freesite,
would be to list everything in one file, maybe '/.bulk'.

But before I launch into something like this, the question to ask is
whether others might see value in having human-readable yet secure and
(relatively) trustworthy URIs.

For me, I would see value, because I'm getting a bit tired of the
current URIs being so long that I can't see the file extension in my
browser address or status bars.

Anyway, your thoughts?

-- 
Kind regards
David