The Ambitious Plan To Reinvent How Websites Get Their Names

'When you type in a URL to your browser and press "enter," your
browser sends that name to a network of computers called the Domain
Name System (DNS), which converts it into IP addresses. These numbers
are what allow your browser to find the right server on the internet
and connect to it. When you navigate to a website, you are trusting a
handful of organizations that have been charged with keeping the DNS
working and secure.

"To people like Steven McKie, a developer for and investor in an
open-source project called the Handshake Network, this centralized
power over internet naming makes the internet vulnerable to both
censorship and cyberattacks," reports MIT technology review.
"Handshake wants to decentralize it by creating an alternative naming
system that nobody controls. In doing so, it could help protect us
from hackers trying to exploit the DNS's security weaknesses, and from
governments hoping to use it to block free expression." From the
report:

The system would be based on blockchain technology, meaning it would
be software that runs on a widely distributed network of computers. In
theory, it would have no single point of failure and depend on no
human-run organization that could be corrupted or co-opted.
Handshake's software is a heavily modified version ("fork") of
Bitcoin, and just as Bitcoin's network of miners protects the
cryptocurrency from manipulation and makes it virtually impossible for
authorities to shut down, a similar network could keep a permanent,
censorship-resistant record of internet names. The Handshake team is
far from the first to try to create a decentralized naming system for
the web. But unlike previous efforts, Handshake isn't trying to
replace DNS but work with it.

Besides ICANN, there's yet another class of organization whose job
Handshake aims to decentralize. See that little padlock icon in your
browser bar, to the left of the domain name? That means your computer
has verified that your connection to this website is encrypted and
that the site is authentic, not a fake one designed by a criminal
trying to steal your login credentials. It does that by checking the
veracity of a string of numbers called the site's digital certificate,
issued by one of a number of so-called certificate authorities. These
entities, many of which are for-profit companies, are crucial to
internet security. They can also get hacked. And if one gets breached,
and an attacker can start issuing fake certificates, it undermines the
security of the whole internet. But if website names are managed on a
tamper-resistant blockchain, then you don't need certificate
authorities; the naming system itself can provide the guarantee that
the site you're connected to is real. That's what Handshake aims to
do. '

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/06/06/0028220

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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