I started this discussion on the Apps list but the technology that would make it work is TRANS so I thought I would raise it here as well.
One of the big problems with DNS is that I don't buy a DNS name, I can only rent it. And that means that names that are DNS bound can always be reassigned in the future. Which is one of the reasons why HTTP urls are unsatisfactory. Larry Masinter has of course raised this sort of concern before and proposed dated URLs. But this morning a different approach to the problem occurred to me: Lets take a URL at a web site and imagine I download a page on 1st Jan 2010: http://www.cnn.com/whatever.html Now what if I wanted to connect up today to the same party that I connected to last time. This is not the same as the URN or the dated URL problem. I want to connect up to the same entity regardless of whom ICANN happen to sell the domain name to next. How about one of the following: http://www.cnn.com.2010/whatever.html http://www.cnn.com.1.2010/whatever.html http://www.cnn.com.1.1.2010/whatever.html DNS labels are not allowed to be all numbers but the DNS protocol works for them. In fact they seem to work with my existing software which was not a design goal but would be cool. Now resolving such names would of course require a new infrastructure, quite possibly a subscription infrastructure that would track the changing ownership of the names over time. And this infrastructure would probably involve Certificate Transparency like services and DNSSEC. But we could use this to provide persistence for Web content and for Web services which would be incredibly cool. We can also apply the same idea to email addresses: [email protected] could be anyone. [email protected] is uniquely my account. So the infrastructure that would be required here would be 1) A set of trans notary logs that people could register their DNSSEC KSKs in. 2) A set of DNS servers that accepted DNS zone updates for dated zones from the keyholders of the registered keys. The practical effect would be that once a name was registered and the key enrolled in the log, the holder of the key can then maintain the claim to the dated zone for as long as they hold the key. Resolution will continue to function as long as the keyholder provides updates. One of the uses for this type of technology would be in cyber conflict situations where we want to make use of a naming infrastructure that does not introduce a possible point of compromise. _______________________________________________ Trans mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/trans
