Tony Finch – blog

Recently the Spritely Institute published an introduction to Petnames, A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming.

I have long been a fan of petnames, and graph naming systems in general. I first learned about them in the context of Mark Miller’s E programming language which was a distributed object capability system on the JVM. I gather Spritely are working on something similar, but with a more webby lisp/scheme flavour – and in fact Mark Miller is the second author on this article.

An interesting thing that the article sort of hints at is that these kinds of systems have a fairly smooth range of operating points from decentralized petnames all the way to centralized globally unique names. Zooko’s triangle is actually more like a fan when the “human friendly” point is fixed: there’s an arc describing the tradeoffs, from personal through local to global.

As a first step away from petnames, I like to use the term “nickname” for nearby instances of what they call “edge names” in the article: a nickname is not as personal as a petname, it’s a name you share with others.

A bit further along the arc is the article’s example of the “bizdir” local business directory. It’s a trusted (and hopefully trustworthy) naming authority, but in a more local / federated fashion rather than centralized.

How can a petname system function at the global+centralized point, so it could replace the DNS? It needs to pass the “billboard test”: I type in a name I see on a billboard and I get to the right place. (It might be a multipart name like a postal address or DNS name, with an extra “edge name” or two to provide enough disambiguating context.)

I imagine that an operating system supplier might provide a few preconfigured petnames (it probably includes its own petname so the software can update itself securely), a lot like its preconfigured PKIX CA certificates. These petnames would refer to orgs like the “bizdir”, or Verisign, or Nominet, that act as nickname registries. Your collection of petnames is in effect your personal root zone, and the preconfigured petnames are in effect the default TLDs.

When I was thinking about how a decentralized graph naming system could be made user-friendly and able to pass the billboard test I realised that there are organizational structures that are hard to avoid. I expect there would inevitably be something like the CA/Browser forum to mediate between OS suppliers and nickname registries: a petname ICANN.

I wrote an older iteration of these ideas over a decade ago. Those notes suffer from too many DNS brainworms, but looking back, there’s some curious anti-DNS discussion. How might it be useful to be able to reach a name by multiple paths? Could you use that for attestation? What might it look like to have a shared context for names that is not global but is national or regional or local?