Domain Key Service

Requirements

Sacrifice human readability of "name"s because:

• You can only have two of {readability, uniqueness, [remind me?]}.
• We don't want trademark law to trump domain registration rules.
• Search engines and QR codes exist now.

No root name servers because:

• They are points of attack/failure.
• They are opportunities for rent and vetos.

Space of "name"s must be large so anybody can get one.

Registration of a "name" must be cheap, easy, automatable.

Each "name" is mapped to a record including:

• An IP address
• Registration date
• IP address of the authoritative name server
• Time to live
• The owner of the name (cryptographic identity)
• Optional contact details

Clients can look up the record (including the IP address) associated

with a "name":

• The result can be cached.
• The result cannot be forged.

Names are "owned" by the person who registered them.

The owner of a "name" can edit the data associated with the name.

Such edits must propagate across the internet in a timely fashion, similarly to DNS.

Running a name server should be cheap:

• The software is simple and easy to reimplement.
• The protocol is stateless.
• The record associated with a name registration must be small enough that a single name server can feasibly store a significant fraction of all such records in the world.
• The record associated with a name registration must not be capable of containing illegal material.
• Avoid any feature that might require regulation.

Design

A "name"s is (the one-way hash of) a public key.

The cryptographic identity of the owner is the (unhashed) public key.

The owner of a "name" is anybody who knows the corresponding private key.

The record associated with a name is a small text file in a defined format (S-expression? JSON?), signed with the private key.

A name server is a hashtable from names to records, hosted at a known IP address.

Queries can be submitted to any name server using a UDP-based protocol. It suffices to find just one that knows the corresponding record.

A non-hierarchical list of the IP addresses of well-known name servers is distributed with your OS.

Where name servers disagree, the most recent (past) registration date wins.

When a record expires, a replacement can be fetched from the authoritative name server using an ordinary query.

• If the replacement is not the newest record, the owner of the "name" has messed up; this is not our problem.

Name servers attract traffic by mirroring each other, thus propagating updates around the internet.

The best name servers can perhaps charge a small fee for registrations, which people will pay in order to provide low-latency authoritative responses to the widest audience.