37 ms·

Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet

222 points by troquerre 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
airstrike 7y ago
How about the risk of parking TLDs on Handshake? Say, by taking every .{lastname} out there just in case someone wants it in the future...
- xur17 7y ago
  Doesn't that risk already exist with the current system?
  - kordlessagain 7y ago
    Depends on the cost. Domains used to be free but nobody gave a shit because nobody used the Internet. Ah, the good old days.
    - troquerre 7y ago
      I think that arbitrage disappeared pretty quickly. Domainers have been around for a long time...
- igliu 7y ago
  Could certainly happen, but there's a couple mechanisms that mitigate this: 1) The network will only allow you to bid on a name if it has been at least `hash(name) % 52` weeks after mainnet launch. Squatters cannot purchase all of the good names on day 1. 2) The network limits the total number of domain renewals that can occur each block. Eventually this will lead to fee pressure and make renewing 10,000s of domains expensive for squatters. 3) It's possible to atomically trade names for coins on-chain, so squatters that self-custody will likely do this to make selling their names easier. The names will end up with someone that actually uses it
  - hagreet 7y ago
    So my domain will become more and more expensive? Great.
Avamander 7y ago
Also posted on reddit with the owner trying to answer some questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/d5iv4y/decentralizing_dns_to_improve_the_security_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/d5iv4y/decentralizi...
- troquerre 7y ago
  Author of the post here. The r/netsec community brings up good points. One thing that's come up frequently is the question of trademark disputes. Handshake does have mechanisms in place to protect a good number of existing trademarks (only the domain owners of the top 100k Alexa domains can register their names as TLDs), and it also has mechanisms to prevent early squatting through the 52 week period for name rollouts. These mechanics protect trademarks in the short term, but in the long term anyone can bid on an unregistered name in the open auction system that Handshake created. My perspective on this is that there isn't an inherent reason why a naming system needs to deal with trademark issues — there are pros and cons to names being registered in an open auction, just like there are pros and cons to Bitcoin being a store of value that's difficult to censor and seize.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    There are very good public safety reasons to allow lifting domains from their current owners. Like if someone owns Microsift and puts a phishing page on it. What about botnet C2 servers?
    - xur17 7y ago
      This doesn't completely solve the problem, but the top 100k domains on Alexa will be reserved for those domain owners (ex microsoft.com can claim microsoft, google.com Google, etc).
jstewartmobile 7y ago
No company in its right mind is going to trust its brand to this. Megacorps want an administrative solution--a clear target they can throw money and lawyers at if something goes south--rather than blockchain, where a disgruntled employee can run off with the private key and hose the domains for perpetuity.
- troquerre 7y ago
  Author of the post here. I agree with you on this, at least in the early days. I don't expect any major company to switch to Handshake or even adopt Handshake. Realistically, adoption will happy in a bottoms-up fashion, starting with people in the jurisdictions that need it most. For instance, Spain shut down IPFS gateways when Catalonians used it to advertise the Catalan independence referendum. If the IPFS gateway was on Handshake, it would have been much more difficult to take down the gateways. https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/728tt4/note_ipfs_gateway_blocked_in_spain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/728tt4/note_ipfs_gate...
lostmsu 7y ago
It would actually make sense to have ICANN create an official TLD for Handshake.
- troquerre 7y ago
  We've spoken with people involved with the ICANN and I think that'd be unlikely. In a sense, ICANN is the incumbent that Handshake is trying to unseat, so it's not surprising that they don't like it. There have also been numerous alternative root projects in the past that all failed, so when ICANN people see that aspect of Handshake they quickly dismiss it. Interestingly, we've had conversations with Vint Cerf who invented TCP/IP and he actually liked the properties that Handshake provides (wasn't a fan of the blockchain implementation though). Vint proposed a system with similar properties in the past as well: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/12/232883-self-authenticating-identifiers/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/12/232883-self-authentic...
_wldu 7y ago
I never imagined someone would write a recursive DNS sever in javascript. Have they explained why they chose javascript? It can't perform well nor scale and they even sort of admit that: https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd#unbound-support https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd#unbound-support
- acdha 7y ago
  It’s a blockchain: JavaScript is the least of their worries.
- QuicksilverJohn 7y ago
  Basically, only the root record parsing is done in JS and then passed to unbound for resolution. Though it is possible to run a pure JS resolver, it's not really recommended. There's also a more portable authoritative & recursive [resolver in C](https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd). Plus, the whole protocol for node communication and name resolution & proofs is so simple, that it's pretty easy to reimplement in any language.
  - w8rbt 7y ago
    Right, thanks. And I hope my question does not sound too critical. I was just genuinely curious why JS was used. I think JS is fine for small to mid-sized tasks, prototyping and testing ideas. However, for real DNS servers, used by a lot of clients, I believe C, C++, Go or Rust would be an absolute requirement.
    - troquerre 7y ago
      This is separate from the DNS resolver being written in JS, but the team behind Handshake also created bcoin, which is the only javascript fullnode (and non-core fullnode IIRC) that has mined a Bitcoin block. https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin
    - tynes 7y ago
      The JS implemention is a fork of bcoin, the JS Bitcoin full node and production backend. It binds to libunbound but you are right that you would want a lower level language for it to be more scalable. There is a rust implemention work in progress here: https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd There is also a C light client here: https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd For the consensus, there are C bindings for the cryptography and a workerpool that really speeds things up. It could also be possible to dump the Handshake zone into a zone file and serve from behind unbound.
troquerre 7y ago
Author of the post here. If you have any questions I'll be online for a while to respond to them. We're serious about attempting to improve the security of the internet, so criticisms are welcome too.
- hlieberman 7y ago
  Isn't this just basically Namecoin but with venture capital money?
  - troquerre 7y ago
    Previous attempts at blockchain naming have basically failed, and there are a few reasons why. I go more in-depth into why Handshake is different/may succeed this time around in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001806
hannob 7y ago
"Blockchain-based alternative to CAs" has been discussed before there even was the word blockchain (it was called sovereign keys, at least it's pretty close to a blockchain). I'd expect someone trying at least discussing why that didn't make it. Also I'm really annoyed by the "there was a problem with CAs in 2011, this system is really bad"-tune ignoring what has been changed since then. (E.g. the "You don’t know who all these CA intermediates are" may be true, but that's your problem, because you very well could know, the information is there.)
- QuicksilverJohn 7y ago
  It's actually pretty difficult to enumerate all trusted CAs (or even just what organizations are running CAs). Certificate Transparency certainly helps there, but it's not fully required, and doesn't solve all problems. The DigiNotar attack (from 2011) was mainly chosen because it's well known and easy to convey. It wasn't even that technically effectively because Chrome had Google's keys pinned, so it was immediately blocked and reported (like you would get with CT today). But, only in Chrome. More recent examples of mississuance, like tricking Comodo's OCR-based validation [0] or spoofing DNS to hijack Let's Encrypt issuance [1]. CA's are always going to be vulnerable to these sorts of attacks, and they have such a broad attack surface and so much systemic trust (i.e power) that can cause unbounded damages with any error. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311713 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311713 [1] https://www.wired.com/2017/04/hackers-hijacked-banks-entire-online-operation https://www.wired.com/2017/04/hackers-hijacked-banks-entire-...
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    > It's actually pretty difficult to enumerate all trusted CAs (or even just what organizations are running CAs). Sure, but somebody else already did that so you can just rely on their work. https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Intermediate_Certificates https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Intermediate_Certificates
- troquerre 7y ago
  Author of the post here. My aim was to keep this post focused and cover the differences between Handshake and previous blockchain DNS attempts in a separate post. The keyword here is attempts: previous projects like Namecoin and ENS haven't really taken off. I think the reason has to do with the underlying technology and the go-to-market strategy (or lack thereof) of the projects. On the technology front, Handshake is the only naming blockchain that's launching with a light client that can resolve names. This may seem like a small thing but it's actually a critical input to success — without a light client, users would either need to run fullnodes (which no one does bc of the terrible ux) or rely on third party services. Third party services provide good ux but reduce the benefit of using the decentralized system in the first place. On the go-to-market front, the initial distribution of names is really important. It's much more important than the initial distribution of something like Bitcoin because names are non-fungible. They're digital real estate so if a whale is able to bid up all the good names before adoption, there will be no incentive for new participants to invest in the ecosystem (this happened to the previous projects). Handshake created a few GTM mechanics to prevent that outcome: * The Alexa top 100k domains have been pre-registered, so that only those domain owners can register their names on Handshake * Names are released for bidding over a 52 week period. If you hear about Handshake 8 months into launch there will still be a lot of good names available * Auctions last two weeks and require locking up your coins, making it difficult to bid and win on a lot of names at once. * Most importantly imo, Handshake coins are being distributed to developers, not investors. 70% of the initial Handshake coins are being airdropped to ~250k open-source developers. Basically, if you have a GitHub account with over 15 followers and an SSH key, you can anonymously claim Handshake coins. This is a no-strings attached giveaway so it will hopefully give developers a reason to check out the project, and it also makes it difficult for whales to buy up a lot of coins early on to outbid everyone.
seibelj 7y ago
Are namebase and handshake related? How is handshake.org different?
- agrinman 7y ago
  namebase is to handshake as coinbase is to bitcoin
  - QuicksilverJohn 7y ago
    Yep. And it's also a DNS registrar.
funfunfunction 7y ago
I love the idea but it seems like like a long shot to get the network effect working in your favor instead of against you. You mention a bottoms up approach and what happened in Catalonia but that is such a tiny percentage of the population facing problems that most people will hopefully never face. How does this go mainstream? Why should the average person care about a more secure solution to DNS? Most people happily ship their data off to Google and Facebook and are blissfully ignorant about the potential consequences. It seems like you would have to make people care more about internet privacy before something like this would work on a large scale. IMO, it faces the problem that most crypto projects are running into; it might be good solution, but the problem doesn’t effect the average person enough for it gain mainstream traction.
- troquerre 7y ago
  There are many instances where an intolerant minority is able to get a neutral majority to adopt their will. Nassim Taleb describes this as the minority rule. It’s the same reason why all lemonade is kosher* A small minority of people NEED censorship-resistant and seizure-resistant DNS, and the bet is that they can get the majority to adopt Handshake. The key is that Handshake is backwards compatible with existing DNS, so for the majority that don’t care, they can switch to Handshake without problem. I’d also emphasize that in addition to the minority that absolutely needs it, there are millions of prosumers who care about privacy and security as well, as evident by how quickly Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 has grown. On the point of Cloudflare, 1.1.1.1 often gets a lot of usage in countries with strict DNS censorship. When Turkey took down twitter.com, people literally spray painted 1.1.1.1 on walls since you could use it to get around the censorship. OpenDNS got a lot of growth outside the US this way as well. In both the case of Cloudflare and OpenDNS, they can’t promote the censorship-resistant use case as strongly because they have a single IP. Handshake doesn’t face the same restriction. Eventually, the goal is to get browsers to adopt Handshake in order to reach the late majority who don’t care either way, but that would only happen after significant bottoms up adoption. At a certain point it’d make sense for Opera and Brave to integrate Handshake, and then Firefox, Edge, and all the other browsers as well. *https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
EGreg 7y ago
But how does this solve the problem of Trust on First Use? Blockchains can safeguard the integrity of the data, but how do we know that painting in the real world corresponds to the token that purports to represent it? How do we know that business on Google really is that business and not a guy in their basement? How does Google or anyone really verify it, whether they are a top-down corporation or a blockchain or a decentralized project like OpenStreetMap?
- troquerre 7y ago
  Can you elaborate? It seems that you’re describing a problem that’s separate from secure naming and communication to servers.
- tynes 7y ago
  Proof of Work solves that by preventing Sybil attacks - it's costly to mine (which is equivalent to signing off on, because it wouldn't make sense to sign an invalid block, you would get rewarded). It's the only signature scheme known to be dynamic and allow for an arbitrary participant size. The point is that you can trust the chain with the most proof of work. As long as you maintain a diverse set of peers and validate blocks, you can know the state of the network.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    It doesn’t solve this problem at all. The site says: How do you know that Google's public key is actually Google's public key? When you make that first request to Google, an intermediate network may have intercepted your request and returned a fake public key for Google. CAs attempt to solve this problem. CAs are trusted third parties that verify the authenticity of public keys for websites. How does proof of work ensure that google.com really goes to Google and not someone who paid $2,000 to mine something?
    - troquerre 7y ago
      A miner wouldn’t be able to do that. Only the private key owner of Google could do that. At most a miner could do a double spend attack (would cost a lot more than $2000), but that wouldn’t change the DNS record for Google.
gonational 7y ago
Question to author: will it be possible in Handshake for the community to agree to censor a domain via a vote of some kind? (FTR, I hope not)
- troquerre 7y ago
  There is no way to do that via the blockchain itself. Theoretically, the community could hard fork Handshake to exclude certain names, but that’s unlikely as it’s antithetical to why the community would use Handshake in the first place. It’d be like if the Bitcoin community hardforked out certain addresses in Bitcoin...
vinay_ys 7y ago
Blockchain solutions in real world work because of people's ability to form legally binding consortium made up of real business entities that have decided to cooperate with each other. Crypto backed distributed trust that blockchain brings into such consortiums has no value other than superficial optics and hype novelty as of today. It doesn't solve any real problems that isn't already solved by legal mechanisms. To prove this, if you take away the legal mechanisms upon which the consortium is built, the consortium will fail and blockchain won't be able to hold it together. For example, Bitcoin has value because masses trust they can convert it back to fiat currency via a coin exchange. Coin exchanges are real business legal entities that are subject to laws and regulations as they deal with fiat currency. For the masses, these laws and regulations are what confer that trust on those exchanges, not crypto. It is best to think of bitcoin as a technical protocol but with very interesting properties, technical properties, and that has certain implications in real world – specifically w.r.t tampering and double spending or theft fraud. But this by itself has no real world value without the legal system backing its conversion to fiat currency. Without this relation to fiat currency, the technical properties are worthless on their own. Similarly, handshake blockchain has no real world value unless a legally recognized consortium emerges to add value to it in real world. Using bitcoin metaphor, instead of real world fiat currency it is real world names, trademarks that gets "converted" to digital names on this handshake blockchain that gives this blockchain any value. Once you have a trademark/realname "converted" on this blockchain, your ownership cannot be "stolen or double-spent" etc. That's the intrinsic crypto property of the blockchain which has some real-world value. But this name "conversion" has to be done by "exchanges" which are real-world business entities to which laws can be applied. Without this being baked into the system, this is dead on arrival.
al_form2000 7y ago
I find this trend of applications packing their own resolver concerning. If nothing else, it widens greatly the attack surface to name resolution. I also foresee mayhem with perimeter firewalls and stuff. It should be possible to block this at the OS level.
- _squared_ 7y ago
  Mainstream OSs are slow to evolve. While I agree that embedded DNS resolvers in browsers and the like should have an off switch, I think embedding in widely adopted software is the only solution to push adoption of these new privacy-focused protocols. Pushing updates to ever-green browsers is the key to change how millions of people use their computer - since browsing the web is almost all they do!
comex 7y ago
It still seems bizarre to me that this system lets people register arbitrary TLDs. If nothing else, sooner or later a new ICANN gTLD will conflict with a Handshake registration. At that point, Handshake will no longer be a backwards compatible extension of the existing DNS, so systems will have to choose one or the other. Maybe the Handshake authors think that when that day comes (and it's probably not that far off), Handshake will already have achieved enough popularity that operating systems and browsers will choose Handshake instead of ICANN. Somehow, I doubt it... Imagine IPv6, but if it was somehow designed to squat on top of the IPv4 namespace, so that switching to IPv6 would cause existing addresses to start pointing somewhere else. That's pretty much the situation Handshake has chosen to be in. Not to mention that allocating TLDs - confuses non-technical users ("what do you mean, there's no dot in the address?") - conflicts with the choice of most browsers to unify the address and search bar (if I type refrigerators and press enter, I want a search results page, not the homepage of whoever registered the TLD 'refrigerators') - may conflict with other non-standard domain name systems, including special-purpose TLDs like .onion – though they've at least reserved the existing ones, so it would only be a problem for not-yet-developed systems It's strange, because I want to support decentralized name systems, and Handshake seems better designed than some of the previous attempts, but that one decision makes it seemingly guaranteed to fail.
- raykyri 7y ago
  This paragraph from the blog post doesn't completely address your comment (or even most of it), but it seems useful to have as a reference as I've almost always missed it: > How Handshake conflicts with ICANN > All 1500 of the existing ICANN TLDs are blacklisted on Handshake for backwards-compatibility. This means that end-users resolving their DNS through Handshake can still access .com domains as normal. New ICANN TLDs can theoretically conflict with Handshake TLDs, but ICANN isn't issuing new TLDs for another few years. When ICANN does issue new TLDs, they’ll only allow at most 500 new TLDs per year. The likelihood of conflict is low even though conflicts can technically happen. In the future, it's up to the community to decide which names take precedence. We believe Handshake names will take precedence because people will find them more useful, and I’ll cover why I think Handshake can gain adoption even in the face of ICANN’s network effects in another blog post.
viraptor 7y ago
> The likelihood of conflict is low even though conflicts can technically happen. If registrations are random - sure. But isn't conflict pretty much guaranteed since people will try to register all the big names?
vectorEQ 7y ago
isn't dns already decentralised? (apart form everyone basically using the same server(s) / google ?) you can just set up your own dns if you want to have your own mappings of ip->dn and vice versa. just set your dns to the server you prefer?
- topranks 7y ago
  The root DNS servers are distributed widely and operated by different organizations. But it’s a single root, and it is administered by ICANN directly who decide who can be a root name operator. So there is central control there.
  - vectorEQ 7y ago
    this does not stop one from having their own dns server and resolving what they like. the protocol itself has no owner, just a specified way of functioning. one can choose what dns server to use, and how to configure that to respond. building some sort of overlay network on top of the internet has been done before (.onion anyone?). How would this improve upon such a scheme for example? I really don't think it adds anything but the word 'blockchain' to the equation, and i honestly don't think that adds anything in the way of security. additionally, to revoke ones domain name to say, resolve to another host, changing hosting provider for example, would seem impossible in an immutable blockchain. Would that result in forks or in namespace pollution?
- sybercecurity 7y ago
  A non-profit (ICANN) is the administrator of the DNS root zone. ICANN's model uses a multi-stakeholder model, so registrars, ccTLD holders (i.e. governments) all can contribute, but ICANN claims their board has ultimate decision. The actual zonefile is hosted by a group of volunteer organizations. The variety, and the use of anycast means that the root zone is fairly stable and as reliable as any other distributed system (i.e. cloud). You can even download the root zone and run it locally if you want. Handshake is interesting, but it conflates DNS and the CA ecosystem. They are different and used for different things. Most of the big issues around DNS isn't about the protocol, but the policies and legal issues around domain names and their ownership.
tanchoux 7y ago
How long have we wait after registration ? It seems interesting...
- troquerre 7y ago
  Handshake is currently in testnet and the auctions last a few days, but on mainnet the auctions last ~2 weeks. Names are open for bidding for the first 5 days, and then the next 10 days are for bids to be revealed.
zimbatm 7y ago
> Verify Your Identity to buy/sell Are there any ways to acquire HNS without sending a photo ID to a centralized party?
- troquerre 7y ago
  In order to comply with US laws we need to verify people’s identity before they can buy/sell HNS, but fortunately it will be possible to register names without identify verification.
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
Handshake is a blockchain protocol that aims to solve the issue of trusting hundreds of CAs. It's a protocol that's similar to Bitcoin, except instead of using coins as money, you use Handshake coins to register names on the Handshake blockchain. These names are top-level domains (TLDs) like .com, .org, .net. Handshake decentralizes the root zone file, which is the ICANN-controlled file that determines who owns what TLD. Anyone can register their own TLD on the Handshake blockchain. We need some form of DNS decentralization not only for security but also to improve availability.
seamyb88 7y ago
I'm not a blockchain expert (or DNS, for that matter), but my reckoning is that alternatives to public-key infrastructure involving such things as identity-based and attribute-based encryption are a more promising way to get rid of CAs. Tackle it at the level of the trapdoor function, as this is, at least, mathematically robust. The mathematics of networks is less so.
- troquerre 7y ago
  The Innovators Dilemma provides a good framework for thinking through how it’s possible for new technologies to unseat incumbent network effects. Basically, the new technology needs to outperform the existing technology along a dimension that a new user demographic cares about, but that most existing users don’t care about. That’s how Instagram was able to gain traction in spite of Facebook, and Snapchat was able to gain traction in spite of Instagram. For Handshake, it can beat existing DNS along the dimensions of security and censorship resistance, which I think might be enough to give it a foothold to grow. But we shall see...
nikolay 7y ago
Sorry! I'd rather trust Mozilla than some craptocurrency/bullchain company trying to make money out of everything. I don't want to be dealing with speculators and people after the get-rich-quick scheme masqueraded as a "change everything and solve all your problems" solution!
- digitalhans 7y ago
  https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 https://news.softpedia.com/news/gnome-and-gimp-receive-400k-from-handshake-decentralized-certificate-authority-522218.shtml https://news.softpedia.com/news/gnome-and-gimp-receive-400k-... https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives... https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1-million-from-handshake https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1...
  - nikolay 7y ago
    I don't care about their lame Indulgence attempt and portray themselves as somebody different from the stinky HODL crowd!

222 points by troquerre 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

How about the risk of parking TLDs on Handshake? Say, by taking every .{lastname} out there just in case someone wants it in the future...

xur17 7y ago
Doesn't that risk already exist with the current system?
- kordlessagain 7y ago
  Depends on the cost. Domains used to be free but nobody gave a shit because nobody used the Internet. Ah, the good old days.
  - troquerre 7y ago
    I think that arbitrage disappeared pretty quickly. Domainers have been around for a long time...
igliu 7y ago
Could certainly happen, but there's a couple mechanisms that mitigate this: 1) The network will only allow you to bid on a name if it has been at least `hash(name) % 52` weeks after mainnet launch. Squatters cannot purchase all of the good names on day 1. 2) The network limits the total number of domain renewals that can occur each block. Eventually this will lead to fee pressure and make renewing 10,000s of domains expensive for squatters. 3) It's possible to atomically trade names for coins on-chain, so squatters that self-custody will likely do this to make selling their names easier. The names will end up with someone that actually uses it
- hagreet 7y ago
  So my domain will become more and more expensive? Great.

Avamander 7y ago

Also posted on reddit with the owner trying to answer some questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/d5iv4y/decentralizing_dns_to_improve_the_security_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/d5iv4y/decentralizi...

troquerre 7y ago
Author of the post here. The r/netsec community brings up good points. One thing that's come up frequently is the question of trademark disputes. Handshake does have mechanisms in place to protect a good number of existing trademarks (only the domain owners of the top 100k Alexa domains can register their names as TLDs), and it also has mechanisms to prevent early squatting through the 52 week period for name rollouts. These mechanics protect trademarks in the short term, but in the long term anyone can bid on an unregistered name in the open auction system that Handshake created. My perspective on this is that there isn't an inherent reason why a naming system needs to deal with trademark issues — there are pros and cons to names being registered in an open auction, just like there are pros and cons to Bitcoin being a store of value that's difficult to censor and seize.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  There are very good public safety reasons to allow lifting domains from their current owners. Like if someone owns Microsift and puts a phishing page on it. What about botnet C2 servers?
  - xur17 7y ago
    This doesn't completely solve the problem, but the top 100k domains on Alexa will be reserved for those domain owners (ex microsoft.com can claim microsoft, google.com Google, etc).

jstewartmobile 7y ago

No company in its right mind is going to trust its brand to this. Megacorps want an administrative solution--a clear target they can throw money and lawyers at if something goes south--rather than blockchain, where a disgruntled employee can run off with the private key and hose the domains for perpetuity.

troquerre 7y ago
Author of the post here. I agree with you on this, at least in the early days. I don't expect any major company to switch to Handshake or even adopt Handshake. Realistically, adoption will happy in a bottoms-up fashion, starting with people in the jurisdictions that need it most. For instance, Spain shut down IPFS gateways when Catalonians used it to advertise the Catalan independence referendum. If the IPFS gateway was on Handshake, it would have been much more difficult to take down the gateways. https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/728tt4/note_ipfs_gateway_blocked_in_spain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/728tt4/note_ipfs_gate...

lostmsu 7y ago

It would actually make sense to have ICANN create an official TLD for Handshake.

troquerre 7y ago
We've spoken with people involved with the ICANN and I think that'd be unlikely. In a sense, ICANN is the incumbent that Handshake is trying to unseat, so it's not surprising that they don't like it. There have also been numerous alternative root projects in the past that all failed, so when ICANN people see that aspect of Handshake they quickly dismiss it. Interestingly, we've had conversations with Vint Cerf who invented TCP/IP and he actually liked the properties that Handshake provides (wasn't a fan of the blockchain implementation though). Vint proposed a system with similar properties in the past as well: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/12/232883-self-authenticating-identifiers/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/12/232883-self-authentic...

_wldu 7y ago

I never imagined someone would write a recursive DNS sever in javascript. Have they explained why they chose javascript? It can't perform well nor scale and they even sort of admit that: https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd#unbound-support https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd#unbound-support

acdha 7y ago
It’s a blockchain: JavaScript is the least of their worries.
QuicksilverJohn 7y ago
Basically, only the root record parsing is done in JS and then passed to unbound for resolution. Though it is possible to run a pure JS resolver, it's not really recommended. There's also a more portable authoritative & recursive [resolver in C](https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd). Plus, the whole protocol for node communication and name resolution & proofs is so simple, that it's pretty easy to reimplement in any language.
- w8rbt 7y ago
  Right, thanks. And I hope my question does not sound too critical. I was just genuinely curious why JS was used. I think JS is fine for small to mid-sized tasks, prototyping and testing ideas. However, for real DNS servers, used by a lot of clients, I believe C, C++, Go or Rust would be an absolute requirement.
  - troquerre 7y ago
    This is separate from the DNS resolver being written in JS, but the team behind Handshake also created bcoin, which is the only javascript fullnode (and non-core fullnode IIRC) that has mined a Bitcoin block. https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin
  - tynes 7y ago
    The JS implemention is a fork of bcoin, the JS Bitcoin full node and production backend. It binds to libunbound but you are right that you would want a lower level language for it to be more scalable. There is a rust implemention work in progress here: https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd There is also a C light client here: https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd For the consensus, there are C bindings for the cryptography and a workerpool that really speeds things up. It could also be possible to dump the Handshake zone into a zone file and serve from behind unbound.

troquerre 7y ago

Author of the post here. If you have any questions I'll be online for a while to respond to them. We're serious about attempting to improve the security of the internet, so criticisms are welcome too.

hlieberman 7y ago
Isn't this just basically Namecoin but with venture capital money?
- troquerre 7y ago
  Previous attempts at blockchain naming have basically failed, and there are a few reasons why. I go more in-depth into why Handshake is different/may succeed this time around in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001806

hannob 7y ago

"Blockchain-based alternative to CAs" has been discussed before there even was the word blockchain (it was called sovereign keys, at least it's pretty close to a blockchain). I'd expect someone trying at least discussing why that didn't make it. Also I'm really annoyed by the "there was a problem with CAs in 2011, this system is really bad"-tune ignoring what has been changed since then. (E.g. the "You don’t know who all these CA intermediates are" may be true, but that's your problem, because you very well could know, the information is there.)

QuicksilverJohn 7y ago
It's actually pretty difficult to enumerate all trusted CAs (or even just what organizations are running CAs). Certificate Transparency certainly helps there, but it's not fully required, and doesn't solve all problems. The DigiNotar attack (from 2011) was mainly chosen because it's well known and easy to convey. It wasn't even that technically effectively because Chrome had Google's keys pinned, so it was immediately blocked and reported (like you would get with CT today). But, only in Chrome. More recent examples of mississuance, like tricking Comodo's OCR-based validation [0] or spoofing DNS to hijack Let's Encrypt issuance [1]. CA's are always going to be vulnerable to these sorts of attacks, and they have such a broad attack surface and so much systemic trust (i.e power) that can cause unbounded damages with any error. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311713 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311713 [1] https://www.wired.com/2017/04/hackers-hijacked-banks-entire-online-operation https://www.wired.com/2017/04/hackers-hijacked-banks-entire-...
- tialaramex 7y ago
  > It's actually pretty difficult to enumerate all trusted CAs (or even just what organizations are running CAs). Sure, but somebody else already did that so you can just rely on their work. https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Intermediate_Certificates https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Intermediate_Certificates
troquerre 7y ago
Author of the post here. My aim was to keep this post focused and cover the differences between Handshake and previous blockchain DNS attempts in a separate post. The keyword here is attempts: previous projects like Namecoin and ENS haven't really taken off. I think the reason has to do with the underlying technology and the go-to-market strategy (or lack thereof) of the projects. On the technology front, Handshake is the only naming blockchain that's launching with a light client that can resolve names. This may seem like a small thing but it's actually a critical input to success — without a light client, users would either need to run fullnodes (which no one does bc of the terrible ux) or rely on third party services. Third party services provide good ux but reduce the benefit of using the decentralized system in the first place. On the go-to-market front, the initial distribution of names is really important. It's much more important than the initial distribution of something like Bitcoin because names are non-fungible. They're digital real estate so if a whale is able to bid up all the good names before adoption, there will be no incentive for new participants to invest in the ecosystem (this happened to the previous projects). Handshake created a few GTM mechanics to prevent that outcome: * The Alexa top 100k domains have been pre-registered, so that only those domain owners can register their names on Handshake * Names are released for bidding over a 52 week period. If you hear about Handshake 8 months into launch there will still be a lot of good names available * Auctions last two weeks and require locking up your coins, making it difficult to bid and win on a lot of names at once. * Most importantly imo, Handshake coins are being distributed to developers, not investors. 70% of the initial Handshake coins are being airdropped to ~250k open-source developers. Basically, if you have a GitHub account with over 15 followers and an SSH key, you can anonymously claim Handshake coins. This is a no-strings attached giveaway so it will hopefully give developers a reason to check out the project, and it also makes it difficult for whales to buy up a lot of coins early on to outbid everyone.

seibelj 7y ago

Are namebase and handshake related? How is handshake.org different?

agrinman 7y ago
namebase is to handshake as coinbase is to bitcoin
- QuicksilverJohn 7y ago
  Yep. And it's also a DNS registrar.

funfunfunction 7y ago

I love the idea but it seems like like a long shot to get the network effect working in your favor instead of against you. You mention a bottoms up approach and what happened in Catalonia but that is such a tiny percentage of the population facing problems that most people will hopefully never face. How does this go mainstream? Why should the average person care about a more secure solution to DNS? Most people happily ship their data off to Google and Facebook and are blissfully ignorant about the potential consequences. It seems like you would have to make people care more about internet privacy before something like this would work on a large scale. IMO, it faces the problem that most crypto projects are running into; it might be good solution, but the problem doesn’t effect the average person enough for it gain mainstream traction.

troquerre 7y ago
There are many instances where an intolerant minority is able to get a neutral majority to adopt their will. Nassim Taleb describes this as the minority rule. It’s the same reason why all lemonade is kosher* A small minority of people NEED censorship-resistant and seizure-resistant DNS, and the bet is that they can get the majority to adopt Handshake. The key is that Handshake is backwards compatible with existing DNS, so for the majority that don’t care, they can switch to Handshake without problem. I’d also emphasize that in addition to the minority that absolutely needs it, there are millions of prosumers who care about privacy and security as well, as evident by how quickly Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 has grown. On the point of Cloudflare, 1.1.1.1 often gets a lot of usage in countries with strict DNS censorship. When Turkey took down twitter.com, people literally spray painted 1.1.1.1 on walls since you could use it to get around the censorship. OpenDNS got a lot of growth outside the US this way as well. In both the case of Cloudflare and OpenDNS, they can’t promote the censorship-resistant use case as strongly because they have a single IP. Handshake doesn’t face the same restriction. Eventually, the goal is to get browsers to adopt Handshake in order to reach the late majority who don’t care either way, but that would only happen after significant bottoms up adoption. At a certain point it’d make sense for Opera and Brave to integrate Handshake, and then Firefox, Edge, and all the other browsers as well. *https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

EGreg 7y ago

But how does this solve the problem of Trust on First Use? Blockchains can safeguard the integrity of the data, but how do we know that painting in the real world corresponds to the token that purports to represent it? How do we know that business on Google really is that business and not a guy in their basement? How does Google or anyone really verify it, whether they are a top-down corporation or a blockchain or a decentralized project like OpenStreetMap?

troquerre 7y ago
Can you elaborate? It seems that you’re describing a problem that’s separate from secure naming and communication to servers.
tynes 7y ago
Proof of Work solves that by preventing Sybil attacks - it's costly to mine (which is equivalent to signing off on, because it wouldn't make sense to sign an invalid block, you would get rewarded). It's the only signature scheme known to be dynamic and allow for an arbitrary participant size. The point is that you can trust the chain with the most proof of work. As long as you maintain a diverse set of peers and validate blocks, you can know the state of the network.
- EGreg 7y ago
  It doesn’t solve this problem at all. The site says: How do you know that Google's public key is actually Google's public key? When you make that first request to Google, an intermediate network may have intercepted your request and returned a fake public key for Google. CAs attempt to solve this problem. CAs are trusted third parties that verify the authenticity of public keys for websites. How does proof of work ensure that google.com really goes to Google and not someone who paid $2,000 to mine something?
  - troquerre 7y ago
    A miner wouldn’t be able to do that. Only the private key owner of Google could do that. At most a miner could do a double spend attack (would cost a lot more than $2000), but that wouldn’t change the DNS record for Google.

gonational 7y ago

Question to author: will it be possible in Handshake for the community to agree to censor a domain via a vote of some kind? (FTR, I hope not)

troquerre 7y ago
There is no way to do that via the blockchain itself. Theoretically, the community could hard fork Handshake to exclude certain names, but that’s unlikely as it’s antithetical to why the community would use Handshake in the first place. It’d be like if the Bitcoin community hardforked out certain addresses in Bitcoin...

vinay_ys 7y ago

Blockchain solutions in real world work because of people's ability to form legally binding consortium made up of real business entities that have decided to cooperate with each other. Crypto backed distributed trust that blockchain brings into such consortiums has no value other than superficial optics and hype novelty as of today. It doesn't solve any real problems that isn't already solved by legal mechanisms. To prove this, if you take away the legal mechanisms upon which the consortium is built, the consortium will fail and blockchain won't be able to hold it together. For example, Bitcoin has value because masses trust they can convert it back to fiat currency via a coin exchange. Coin exchanges are real business legal entities that are subject to laws and regulations as they deal with fiat currency. For the masses, these laws and regulations are what confer that trust on those exchanges, not crypto. It is best to think of bitcoin as a technical protocol but with very interesting properties, technical properties, and that has certain implications in real world – specifically w.r.t tampering and double spending or theft fraud. But this by itself has no real world value without the legal system backing its conversion to fiat currency. Without this relation to fiat currency, the technical properties are worthless on their own. Similarly, handshake blockchain has no real world value unless a legally recognized consortium emerges to add value to it in real world. Using bitcoin metaphor, instead of real world fiat currency it is real world names, trademarks that gets "converted" to digital names on this handshake blockchain that gives this blockchain any value. Once you have a trademark/realname "converted" on this blockchain, your ownership cannot be "stolen or double-spent" etc. That's the intrinsic crypto property of the blockchain which has some real-world value. But this name "conversion" has to be done by "exchanges" which are real-world business entities to which laws can be applied. Without this being baked into the system, this is dead on arrival.

al_form2000 7y ago

I find this trend of applications packing their own resolver concerning. If nothing else, it widens greatly the attack surface to name resolution. I also foresee mayhem with perimeter firewalls and stuff. It should be possible to block this at the OS level.

_squared_ 7y ago
Mainstream OSs are slow to evolve. While I agree that embedded DNS resolvers in browsers and the like should have an off switch, I think embedding in widely adopted software is the only solution to push adoption of these new privacy-focused protocols. Pushing updates to ever-green browsers is the key to change how millions of people use their computer - since browsing the web is almost all they do!

comex 7y ago

It still seems bizarre to me that this system lets people register arbitrary TLDs. If nothing else, sooner or later a new ICANN gTLD will conflict with a Handshake registration. At that point, Handshake will no longer be a backwards compatible extension of the existing DNS, so systems will have to choose one or the other. Maybe the Handshake authors think that when that day comes (and it's probably not that far off), Handshake will already have achieved enough popularity that operating systems and browsers will choose Handshake instead of ICANN. Somehow, I doubt it... Imagine IPv6, but if it was somehow designed to squat on top of the IPv4 namespace, so that switching to IPv6 would cause existing addresses to start pointing somewhere else. That's pretty much the situation Handshake has chosen to be in. Not to mention that allocating TLDs - confuses non-technical users ("what do you mean, there's no dot in the address?") - conflicts with the choice of most browsers to unify the address and search bar (if I type refrigerators and press enter, I want a search results page, not the homepage of whoever registered the TLD 'refrigerators') - may conflict with other non-standard domain name systems, including special-purpose TLDs like .onion – though they've at least reserved the existing ones, so it would only be a problem for not-yet-developed systems It's strange, because I want to support decentralized name systems, and Handshake seems better designed than some of the previous attempts, but that one decision makes it seemingly guaranteed to fail.

raykyri 7y ago
This paragraph from the blog post doesn't completely address your comment (or even most of it), but it seems useful to have as a reference as I've almost always missed it: > How Handshake conflicts with ICANN > All 1500 of the existing ICANN TLDs are blacklisted on Handshake for backwards-compatibility. This means that end-users resolving their DNS through Handshake can still access .com domains as normal. New ICANN TLDs can theoretically conflict with Handshake TLDs, but ICANN isn't issuing new TLDs for another few years. When ICANN does issue new TLDs, they’ll only allow at most 500 new TLDs per year. The likelihood of conflict is low even though conflicts can technically happen. In the future, it's up to the community to decide which names take precedence. We believe Handshake names will take precedence because people will find them more useful, and I’ll cover why I think Handshake can gain adoption even in the face of ICANN’s network effects in another blog post.

viraptor 7y ago

> The likelihood of conflict is low even though conflicts can technically happen. If registrations are random - sure. But isn't conflict pretty much guaranteed since people will try to register all the big names?

vectorEQ 7y ago

isn't dns already decentralised? (apart form everyone basically using the same server(s) / google ?) you can just set up your own dns if you want to have your own mappings of ip->dn and vice versa. just set your dns to the server you prefer?

topranks 7y ago
The root DNS servers are distributed widely and operated by different organizations. But it’s a single root, and it is administered by ICANN directly who decide who can be a root name operator. So there is central control there.
- vectorEQ 7y ago
  this does not stop one from having their own dns server and resolving what they like. the protocol itself has no owner, just a specified way of functioning. one can choose what dns server to use, and how to configure that to respond. building some sort of overlay network on top of the internet has been done before (.onion anyone?). How would this improve upon such a scheme for example? I really don't think it adds anything but the word 'blockchain' to the equation, and i honestly don't think that adds anything in the way of security. additionally, to revoke ones domain name to say, resolve to another host, changing hosting provider for example, would seem impossible in an immutable blockchain. Would that result in forks or in namespace pollution?
sybercecurity 7y ago
A non-profit (ICANN) is the administrator of the DNS root zone. ICANN's model uses a multi-stakeholder model, so registrars, ccTLD holders (i.e. governments) all can contribute, but ICANN claims their board has ultimate decision. The actual zonefile is hosted by a group of volunteer organizations. The variety, and the use of anycast means that the root zone is fairly stable and as reliable as any other distributed system (i.e. cloud). You can even download the root zone and run it locally if you want. Handshake is interesting, but it conflates DNS and the CA ecosystem. They are different and used for different things. Most of the big issues around DNS isn't about the protocol, but the policies and legal issues around domain names and their ownership.

tanchoux 7y ago

How long have we wait after registration ? It seems interesting...

troquerre 7y ago
Handshake is currently in testnet and the auctions last a few days, but on mainnet the auctions last ~2 weeks. Names are open for bidding for the first 5 days, and then the next 10 days are for bids to be revealed.

zimbatm 7y ago

> Verify Your Identity to buy/sell Are there any ways to acquire HNS without sending a photo ID to a centralized party?

troquerre 7y ago
In order to comply with US laws we need to verify people’s identity before they can buy/sell HNS, but fortunately it will be possible to register names without identify verification.

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

Handshake is a blockchain protocol that aims to solve the issue of trusting hundreds of CAs. It's a protocol that's similar to Bitcoin, except instead of using coins as money, you use Handshake coins to register names on the Handshake blockchain. These names are top-level domains (TLDs) like .com, .org, .net. Handshake decentralizes the root zone file, which is the ICANN-controlled file that determines who owns what TLD. Anyone can register their own TLD on the Handshake blockchain. We need some form of DNS decentralization not only for security but also to improve availability.

seamyb88 7y ago

I'm not a blockchain expert (or DNS, for that matter), but my reckoning is that alternatives to public-key infrastructure involving such things as identity-based and attribute-based encryption are a more promising way to get rid of CAs. Tackle it at the level of the trapdoor function, as this is, at least, mathematically robust. The mathematics of networks is less so.

troquerre 7y ago
The Innovators Dilemma provides a good framework for thinking through how it’s possible for new technologies to unseat incumbent network effects. Basically, the new technology needs to outperform the existing technology along a dimension that a new user demographic cares about, but that most existing users don’t care about. That’s how Instagram was able to gain traction in spite of Facebook, and Snapchat was able to gain traction in spite of Instagram. For Handshake, it can beat existing DNS along the dimensions of security and censorship resistance, which I think might be enough to give it a foothold to grow. But we shall see...

nikolay 7y ago

Sorry! I'd rather trust Mozilla than some craptocurrency/bullchain company trying to make money out of everything. I don't want to be dealing with speculators and people after the get-rich-quick scheme masqueraded as a "change everything and solve all your problems" solution!

digitalhans 7y ago
https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 https://news.softpedia.com/news/gnome-and-gimp-receive-400k-from-handshake-decentralized-certificate-authority-522218.shtml https://news.softpedia.com/news/gnome-and-gimp-receive-400k-... https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives... https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1-million-from-handshake https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1...
- nikolay 7y ago
  I don't care about their lame Indulgence attempt and portray themselves as somebody different from the stinky HODL crowd!