Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming

There is a great saying in computer science that will get a very knowing chuckle from nearly all technologists.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton (via Martin Fowler)

Naming things is a very hard problem, and while we don't think about it much, you are constantly using these names. We couldn't last a minute on the web without DNS.

The challenge with naming things often is managing a "name space", which mostly you can think of as the area where duplicates are not allowed, and name resolution, meaning given a name how do I get to that thing.

As the web and Internet gets more decentralized this becomes a bigger issue. This article has a compelling approach.

A "petname system" is a database and a set of interfaces which use that database to bidirectionally map human readable names to cryptographically secure names. The three types of names in a petname system are:

• petnames: These are set locally by a user to map local meaning to an external identifier. For example, "Mom", "Uncle Bob", and "Pawnee Library".
• edge names: Every entity in a petname system may act as its own namespace, providing "paths" to names to other entities in the system as a graph, and these provided names are called "edge names". For example, "example.org" is an edge name in "dns ⇒ example.org", and "Sarah Smith" is an edge name in "Uncle Bob ⇒ Sarah Smith".1 We don't have to get rid of popular naming systems like DNS, but can absorb them in such a way that they are on equal footing with any other entity.
• proposed names: These are names which are introduced within a local context. For example, email permits users to specify a name on its addressing along with the email address. If you get an email that is cc'ed to Ben Bitdiddle <ben@example.org>, "Ben Bitdiddle" would be the proposed name.
  • self-proposed names In some applications, such as in social network software, it is possible to retrieve an entity's profile to see how that entity would like itself to be referred to. We call this a self-proposed name.

I love the idea of having different name spaces, some shared and some not.