RFC 9498: The GNU Name System

Posted Nov 23, 2023 19:55 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: RFC 9498: The GNU Name System by pizza
Parent article: RFC 9498: The GNU Name System

The user manages it using their bookmark and contact tools, as for phone numbers.
The only thing readable names provide is a false sense of familiarity that make some hostname looks 'legit',
when the DNS system does not at all assure in any way they point to a legit website.
With the GNS, all unknown hostnames look equally dodgy.

RFC 9498: The GNU Name System

Posted Nov 23, 2023 20:30 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> The user manages it using their bookmark and contact tools, as for phone numbers

You forget that for phone numbers, there is an authoritative registry (ie the phone company) that tells you the legal name associated with a given number.

> The only thing readable names provide is a false sense of familiarity that make some hostname looks 'legit',

So how does the user know (in advance) what hostname for "linux weekly news" is "legit" and thus should go into their address book?

> when the DNS system does not at all assure in any way they point to a legit website.

GNS is no better in this respect.

> With the GNS, all unknown hostnames look equally dodgy.

Again, how do you determine which of these "equally dodgy" unknown hostnames is the legitimate "lwn.net"?

I don't doubt that GNS has some niche use cases, but it is in no way a general replacement for DNS. Indeed, given the degree of manual configuration/delegation needed for a GNS resovler to accomplish anything, I'm far from convinced that GNS has anything to offer over doing a similar degree of manual configuration/delegation to an off-the-shelf DNS resolver.

RFC 9498: The GNU Name System

Posted Nov 23, 2023 22:44 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

> So how does the user know (in advance) what hostname for "linux weekly news" is "legit" and thus should go into their address book?

About exactly the same way you do it with DNS, really.

RFC 9498: The GNU Name System

Posted Nov 24, 2023 0:10 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> About exactly the same way you do it with DNS, really.

With DNS you'd query the global authoratative root, with records signed by DNSSEC, and connect to an IP that uses a TLS certificate that matches the domain name. But with GNS, you have to already know who to contact before you can ask them to resolve an address.

(If you can get a direct link via a search engine or some sort of 3rd-party directory, guess what, that same mechanism works with bog-standard DNS as well, and GNS has added nothing. Less than nothing, really, as it's made the user experience _worse_)

So, once again, how does GNS solve (or even improve upon) DNS's [in]ability to determine if a given site is "legit"? At best it's no different, but in practice it's going to be much, much worse.