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Re: [GNUnet-developers] Re: URI suggestion


From: Glenn McGrath
Subject: Re: [GNUnet-developers] Re: URI suggestion
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 10:22:39 +1000

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 12:56:51 -0500
Christian Grothoff <address@hidden> wrote:

> > An optional alias could be attached somehow to the namespace, the
> > obvious concern is collisions, i.e. two seperate namesapces want to
> > use the same alias.
> 
> Right.  The key question is who is allowed to put forward that
> association.  If I can insert a global handle for my own namespace, I
> could (maliciously) pick the alias of someone else who is popular and
> try to impersonate that pseudonym. For users that use the aliases (and
> that don't see the underlying public keys), this attack would succeed.
>  GNUnet could not tell which was the 
> "original" alias / handle and prevent it.
> 
> > Alias wouldnt be the primary identifier, so collisions wouldnt be a
> > problem.
> 
> If they are to be useful for the end-users, they'd likely become the
> primary identifiers...
> 
> > Handle it the same way instant messangers do it.
> 
> Eh, don't they just assume that the "first" person to take an alias
> gets to keep it? In a distributed P2P setting (IMs are centralized!),
> we can't do that.

I think your talking about screen name, AIM uses screen names (words) as
the primary identifier, ICQ uses UIN (a number), i think they have
merged the primary identifier now, not sure exactly on the details.

Alias's arent meant to be unique, multiple people could have the same
alias if they wanted to, as long as the primary identifier is unique its
ok.

If you have someones alias you can try and use it to find there primary
identifier.
The alias might only narrow it down but not go all the way, in that case
the user needs more information to find right namesapce, maybe the user
might recognise the first couple ofdigits in the namespace identifier,
or recognise the content within the namespace.

Its like having the same filename for two different files, as long the
files have a different hash GNUnet can handle it.

Think of filename as alias, and hash as namespace.

There isnt any point having two unique identifiers.

I guess alias should be able to be set by the person who controls the
namesapce, but should be able to overriden locally by other users.



Glenn




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