Resources on Naming

• In an early paper (local copy), Butler W. Lampson et al. suggested how to build a global name space for arbitrary digital objects. Their design allows replications and partial updates, but seems to assume a distributed database of shared keys for authorization.
• In Sape Mullender's Distributed Computing, the 12th chapter, by Roger Needham, is about names. He explains the uses of names in distributed computing and a list of problems that follow from that. He discusses Lampson's paper shortly.
• Stuart Haber, Scott Stornetta Secure Names for Bit-Strings(local copy). The authors present a scheme were short names for documents can be constructed from timestamping certificates. These guarantee the integrity of the named document and can be changed over time. Relies on two central authorities, a timestamping service and a repository to look up the actual location.
• Carl Ellisons SPKI Certificate Theory (RFC 2693) (local copy) has a section on why we cannot expect globaly unique ids for entities to turn up. It includes a history of naming in the computer age with follies like X.509, as well.
• Ross Anderson's Security Engineering contains eight insightful pages about names, pp. 124-132. He explains a lot about the different functions of naming and the silent assumptions about names that do seldom hold.
• Gordon Irlam wrote a page about naming in 1995 (link dead) (local copy ripped from web.archive.org)
• A collection of papers related to global, censorproof file systems is at cypherspace (local copy). Most of the proposed systems have special naming constructs.
• The eternity-fs people had long discussions about namespaces.
• An interesting post is Ted Anderson's Managing a distributed namespace (local copy).
• Part of the above design (notably the names including hashes of the server's/author's public key) is implemented in the Self Certifing File System(link dead) (copy at web.archive.org) (David Mazières' Master Thesis on SFS) and suggested in Ross Anderson's Eternal Resource Locator paper(.pdf) (local copy).
• Zooko wrote a good if informal memo about the problems of non-self certifying names, trust and commemorability, titled Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Memorizable: Choose Two (local copy).
• A broad overview over names and their use in distributed systems such as the net is given in The ANSA Naming Model (local copy).
• John Perry Barlow's Accra Manifesto is mainly about ICANN and problems arising from central administration of the DNS.
• Clay Shirky wrote an article with the title DNS Hell: Is there a solution? (local copy ripped from web.archive.org).
• The draft Host Identity Protocol (local copy), by Moskowitz et al., proposes an architecture-independent naming scheme for hosts.
• CircleID has a whole lot of articles about DNS and other naming schemes and their impact. For example, Francis Hwang's Do Domain Names Matter? , or
• What should be the goals when designing a naming system? Brad Tempelton wrote a well-thought-out article (local copy) on that.
• Adam Back's Auditable Namespace (local copy).
• If names are just tools of refence to resources, than they themselves do not need to be meaningfull. This idea is expanded in MIT's Semantic-Free Referencing project.
• The paper Names in Cryptographic Protocols (local copy) points out design problems in protocols that leave out the explicit names of senders, receivers or subjects
• An IETF draft on A Survey of Internet Identities (local copy) explains current usage of identifiers on the net.
• Chains of local names are defined in Rivest and Lampson's SDSI (local copy).
• The Pet Markup Language (local copy) is something like SDSI, it translates memorizable names to keys and allows linking through local namespaces.
• It is possible to overload standard resolvers like libresolv in bind9. It has an api for alternative lookup etc. mechanisms, called sdb.
• Chord and Circle define distributed hash tables for lookups. The Chord people even defined a distributed DNS: Serving DNS using Chord (.pdf) (local copy) by Russ Cox, Athicha Muthitacharoen and Robert Morris
• Emil Sit and Robert Morris discuss security aspects of distributed hashes in Security Considerations for Peer-to-Peer Distributed Hash Tables (.pdf) (local copy).
• handle relies on a central database, but might be interesting anyhow. Larry Stone describes handle and PURL in an evaluation (local copy).
• The Unified Resource Name (URN) Working Group set out to define ''persistent, location-independent, resource identifiers``. The Dynamic Delegation Discovery System (rfc 3401 - 3405) trys to implement lazy binding from bitstrings to data. The author suggests to use this for resolution of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)". URI are a superset of the URNs.
• The eXtensible Name Service (XNS) standards body has renamed itself to the more lyrical ”eXtensible Data Interchange (XDI)“ standards body. They propose a bundle of XML schemata that express and protect(???) information about identities (personal data, organizational info).
• the Digital Object Identifier system proposes yet another global naming scheme. There even was a partial implementation of it, described in a paper by Andy Powell.
• Michael J. O'Donnell suggests Open Network Handles which are tied to public keys and can be used as intermediate objects betweeen DNS and IP addresses.
• Content-Centric Networking Resources suggests a layer of indirection to create content-based URLs without hostnames in them.
• Internet Distributed Open Name System Discussion Forum.

Last Update: 2008/12/09 23:35:58
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