Re: Federation protocols

2013-06-01 07:57 skrev Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak:
> Exactly. I think using URI (with an optional "username@" part) as UID 
> makes
> sense and doe snot tie us to DNS. Think of the TOR network - nothing 
> is
> stopping anybody from using 'user@example.onion' as an UID, and that 
> is
> *completely* outside the DNS hierarchy.
> The "shape" of the UID doesn't mean it is anchored in the current DNS 
> system.

I am curious here how one would verify - and correctly correlate to 
others in a network - the identity of a federated user if they had a 
purely human-assigned string such as blah@blaha.bla

I wish to argue (and Diaspora had somewhat the same idea I think?) that 
the real identity should be a more definitive - more computery - 
identifier string. Otherwise it will not be truly portable (avoiding 
collisions in a global namespace). One tried and true solution for this 
are GPG identities, which may be combined with WebFinger or whatever 
other lookup process/service/protocol.

I.e. as long as I control the domain "hethane.se" I can setup an ID 
pointer there for mmn@hethane.se to address GPG fingerprint AE68 9813 
0B7C FCE3 B2FA  727B C7CE 635B B52E 9B31 - and then something which 
negotiates this with any feed subscribers in a cryptographically 
verifiable way.

Then I could, say, have an "alias" for my account at a webfingerish 
lookup at my account on "mmn@freesocial.org".


This'd also give content privacy by encrypting to friends' public keys. 
However it would not really address the identify-by-source issues that 
may be of concern to some. (i.e. that the network may know that two 
individuals are communicating, despite not knowing the content)

-- 
Mikael Nordfeldth
http://blog.mmn-o.se/
Xmpp/mail: mmn@hethane.se

Received on Saturday, 1 June 2013 06:48:22 UTC