Subject: [Din] Draft / Specification of the GNU Name System

From: "Schanzenbach, Martin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2020 15:13:14 +0200

Dear DINRG,

at IETF 104, we have presented to you our work on the GNU Name System [1].
Since then, we have been working on improvements and a technical specification of the system [2].
At IETF 108, we appeared at secdispatch in order to discuss if the draft may fit into any existing WG in IETF (or IRTF) [3].
We were encouraged to ask DINRG if it would be interested in this work and continue improving and working on it (see minutes of secdispatch). Your charter would certainly support the general theme of the protocol: "The evolution of distributed ledger technologies and the platforms that leverage them has given rise to the development of decentralized communication and infrastructure systems, and experiments with the same. Some examples include name resolution (Namecoin, Ethereum Name Service), identity management (OneName), distributed storage (IPFS, MaidSafe), distributed applications, or DApps (Blockstack), and IP address allocation and delegation."

Since our appearance at secdispatch, we have received a lot of feedback from the community and experts. We have taken the time to incorporate the feedback and the result is in the current version of the draft as well as our implementation.
As you can see, the draft versions 01 and 02 differ significantly. The two major changes regarding the protocol that we have made are:

1. Improve crypto agility: Allow other zone key types and key derivation schemes and define the required properties.
2. Improve crypto implementation: The used symmetric encryption scheme has been replaced to be more resilient to IND-CCA

For (1.) we have drafted an alternative scheme based on Schnorr signatures. This instantiation is still a draft and not implemented.
Any feedback here is specifically welcomed and helpful.

Finally, we would be happy to appear at the next IETF and discuss whether DINRG would be a place to continue our work with you.

Best
Martin

[1] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/104/slides/slides-104-dinrg-gnu-name-system-00.pdf
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schanzen-gns/
[3] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/108/agenda/agenda-108-secdispatch-02