[Freedombox-discuss] Distributed/non-hierarchical naming/discovery system

[Mike Warren]

"stillyet at googlemail.com" <stillyet at googlemail.com> writes:

> What I've read so far on Freedombox doesn't seem to cover the issues
> of naming and discovery of nodes.Â

It would seem to me the problem is a little different from DNS, where
you want to present a human-readable (and memorable) name for Internet
nodes. For a freedombox, something like the .onion addresses from Tor
might be better (they are public keys) since presumably the user never
has to look at them.

I'm presuming here that a freedombox would have some list of "Friends"
(other boxes) it wants to find. I'm also presuming that whatever the
UI for "adding a friend" is could behind the scenes discover that
friend's public key for their box (e.g. maybe it's just included in
the invite), and hence a stable identifier (the key). Then, the "name
discovery service" is the thing which maps public keys to either DNS
names or actual IPs.

It's probably not even that terrible an idea to simply have all
freedomboxen connect to the Tor network and provide a freedombox
"hidden service" via a .onion URI. This would allow friends' boxes to
connect to each other without adversaries being able to discover who
is friends with whom via the P2P traffic or DNS etc lookups.

-- 
mike warren