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ricochet-im / ricochet

Anonymous peer-to-peer instant messaging
https://ricochet.im/
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OnioNS for human readable addresses #333

Open HulaHoopWhonix opened 8 years ago

HulaHoopWhonix commented 8 years ago

The decentralized, secure Tor based DNS-like system OnioNS will soon be deployed. Why not make Ricochet understand .tor addresses should the latter library be installed on the system in question?

This will allow for human readable nyms to be usable while taking advantage of all Tor's secure properties. Note that as currently designed there is no attempt to hide what addresses exist or what is being queried with OnioNS. PIR design was considered out of scope and I don't think Ricochet tries to hide presence info anyway.

JeremyRand commented 8 years ago

Been a while since I looked at OnioNS, but my understanding is that it's not fully decentralized, in the sense that it trusts a quorum of directory authorities in order to prevent falsification of records. (By contrast, .onion only trusts the directory authorities in order to prevent deanonymization) Am I incorrect on this?

Namecoin makes different tradeoffs; it achieves better decentralization but anonymity is somewhat worse (though there's active research on improving anonymity, e.g. Zerocash).