Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by troquerre on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:01PM (#22176863)

We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust.

DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for your traffic to be compromised.

We're building on top of a new protocol (https://handshake.org, launching in 7 days!!) to create an alternate root zone that's distributed. Developers can register their own TLDs and truly own them by controlling their private keys. In addition, they can pin TLSA certs to their TLD so that CAs aren't needed anymore.

I wrote a more in-depth blog post here: https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...

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Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by geonnave on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:13PM (#22176947)

This is really interesting. Are you using concepts from self-sovereign identity¹²? Do you think there is a relevant intersection?

¹ http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-sov... ² https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-primer/

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Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by troquerre on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:52PM (#22177206)

Yes! It's funny you mention that I just bought The Sovereign Individual — haven't read it yet but from cursory glance I think there is a lot of intersection. Would love to discuss more — we have a discord I can invite you to if you're interested, just ping me at the email in my profile.

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Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by dboreham on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @01:01AM (#22177886)

All blockchains use self sovereign identity. They just don't use that buzz word.

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Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by chinmays on Friday January 31, 2020 @12:04PM (#22203264)

This is super exciting and definitely one of the problem in foundations of internet. Happy to help in any possible way!

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Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by troquerre on Monday February 03, 2020 @05:04PM (#22229752)

@chinmays awesome can you join our discord? Let's discuss there we just launched today!! https://discord.gg/9r9wUrq

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Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by notkaya on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @02:53PM (#22185061)

Do you have any plans to address TLD squatting?

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Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on? by troquerre on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @03:45PM (#22185606)

Handshake has built-in mechanisms to prevent squatting. All TLDs are won through an open vickrey auction (if you win you pay the second-highest bid for the TLD). This prevents squatters from being able to easily buy up all the good names at once.

There is an issue though — the auction system gives early advantage in buying names for cheap. If only 100 people are buying names on day 1, they’ll be able to buy a lot of the names without competition. Handshake has a mechanism to prevent this. Names are released for bidding over the first year so that people who learn about it six months late can still register good names. The release schedule is basically a hash(name) % 52 to determine which week you can start registering any name.

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