[tor-talk] Building Petnames with DNSSEC...?

[Jacob Appelbaum <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

While attending the OpenITP event in Rio this week, we've been
discussing the problem of remembering popular or unpopular .onions.
While things like PurpleOnion[0] exist - it's a different space and I'd
at least like to make it easier.

I'm a DNSSEC cheerleader because I feel like it leaves out a lot of
important privacy issues - query privacy being the most obvious problem,
trust agility being the least obvious. None the less I think we can
ignore the CA system and rely on DNSSEC, which is effectively a CA
system with a different set of delegated trust roots. If we look at
tor2web, we see that it relies on DNS *and* the CA model. I think if we
have tor2web, we're in good shape and that having a similar system that
is trusted by way of DNSSEC alone is also an interesting experiment.

In an ideal world, we'd just have .onion. as a full TLD but until that
date, I think it should be possible to build from a DNSSEC enabled tld
such as .se or .br or whatever is of interest. I'm not sold on any
specific tld though I generally think that since '.' is owned by a US
corporation, I'd probably want the tld to be owned by a different
corporation. Perhaps if something happens, they can fight it out... :)

So the question is - how should this practically work? Should a user be
able to dynamically register foo.petnames.tld and have it resolve to one
or more .onions as CNAME that point somewhere or no where? If somewhere,
where? Furthermore, should we ensure that a .onion can publish a petname
somewhere, so we can do forward the reverse lookup? I think that would
allow for some useful properties.

In such a system, we'd be able to lookup foo.petnames.tld and receive a
.onion or as many .onions as published. To make that useful, we'd need
to ensure that applications using those Petnames were using those
results and then interfacing storing them in some way - probably by
using the petname-tool[1] plugin with Firefox. With such a plugin, we
could automatically learn Petnames, cache them and then perhaps even
confirm them.

In theory, with DNSSEC, we'd be able to verify the signatures, to allow
for DNSSEC protection of the data and of course, the .onion can assert
what Petname is claims. If something doesn't forward and reverse
resolve, we could ensure that they're not bound together.

This is a pretty half-baked idea but my thought was that tor2web is only
useful for HTTP. I'd like it to be partially useful, even for Tor
enabled ssh clients or jabber clients or something I haven't thought of...

All the best,
Jacob

[0] https://github.com/neoeinstein/purpleonion
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/petname-tool/
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