Brainstorming: Assistive Public Key Discovery Service

[neruthes]

Introduction

In the past, we struggled to enable Alice to discover the public key of Bob. The solutions included proof post and adding the public key to the profile bio, but they all had problems.

Now we are holding a brainstorming for an Assistive Public Key Discovery Service (APKDS).

The existing posts-as-declaration strategy shall remain. The Assistive Public Key Discovery Service is an addition to it, instead of an alternative.

The major purpose of this service is to allow better Profile-to-Persona mapping.

[neruthes]

Principles

I propose the following principles:

Name	Description
Centralization Tolerance	We can tolerate some kind of centralization here, since the ecosystem can still work if the APKDS is unavailable.
Federalization	The APKDS should be designed to be deployed on a federated network instead of a single server, but it should work when only 1 node exists.
Expiration	The records should disappear if the user is no longer actively using Maskbook.

Mechanism

Client

• Put
  • The Maskbook installation of Alice has an internal scheduling timer which checks if the previous SetMyProofPosts event was older than 12 hours. If False, Exit(0).
  • Maskbook looks up the database to find the 6 latest Standard Posts (Basic Masked Post) of each Persona.
  • Maskbook signs each list of recent Posts with its corresponding Persona and uploads all the lists of recent Posts to all specified servers (which can be configured by the user in some time later).
  • Maskbook updates the latest SetMyProofPosts event time to the current timestamp.
• Get
  • The Maskbook installation of Bob witnesses Alice_SnsProfile_1 as a potential related profile.
  • Maskbook tries finding the a Masked Post within the most recent X (e.g. 20) entries on the webpage.
  • Maskbook queries the server to get the list of recent Posts.
  • The server returns the list.
  • Maskbook tries each post in a sequence and attempts to find a valid Masked Post in the given URL.

Server

• Put
  • The server receives a list of recent Posts.
  • The server verifies its signature.
  • The server queries the SNS webpages for the Posts which have not been verified previously.
  • The server witnesses the proof posts and acknowledges the Persona-Profile Pair.

[septs]

Core feature set:

1. Core info? e.q: use persona signing with persona public key + current date?
2. Keep alive strategy e.q: last updated, after 30 days auto-delete?