Re: [Ring] Lost device = Lost account?

[Simon Désaulniers]

Hello gentlemen,

> Just remembered this from a Ring blogpost:
> 
> “Graduate and PhD students seek to resolve the question of DHT
> Indexation. To contact a Ring user, it is necessary to know his
> 40-character ID. The DHT indexation will allow users to look for another
> user’s Ring ID through information he has made public such as his name
> or a public alias, while preserving his anonymity. Wondering how it’s
> possible? Marco Rebado, Sylvain Labranche and Simon Désaulniers are
> precisely devising a solution. In the meantime, feel free to communicate
> confidentially with Ring!”
> 
> This predates blockchain use but maybe is still being worked on. ;)

I am the only one student still active on the subject of the indexation. I just
wanted to point out that the indexation in the DHT doesn't provide the same
trust yielded by the use of the blockchain in Ethereum. Therefor, it cannot be
used to manage username expiration. This should be done using the Ethereum
contract. I think it would be possible. In fact, we have been talking about this
between us in the Ring team. Additionally, the indexation on the DHT is more
like a search engine and would not really bring anything new for the use case of
saving your data using only a single device.

Cheers !

On Mon, Jan 02, 2017 at 04:46:08PM +0100, Bruno Pagani wrote:
> Le 02/01/2017 à 16:20, Bruno Pagani a écrit :
> 
> > Hi again,
> >
> > Le 01/01/2017 à 09:53, AHIB a écrit :
> >> That said I don't know if it's technically feasible to incorporate a 
> >> username expiration feature eg. if a username's last seen date by the 
> >> network is 6+ months ago the network would revoke its RingID, allowing its 
> >> recycling. Otherwise it'd be a matter of time before easy and popular 
> >> usernames are reserved to people who are unable or uninterested in using 
> >> them.
> > Not with this blockchain setup AFAIK. And I agree this is not an ideal
> > solution, but is being able to recycle username a good thing (I think it
> > depends on lot on the level of security you expect from this, and thus
> > the targeted audience)? Depending on this, the use of a blockchain might
> > not be a good idea, but that’s just my personal user opinion based on my
> > understanding of how things work.
> >
> > Anyway, designing a decentralized system with all the required
> > properties is quite probably very hard. You want no one to be able to
> > steal your username as long as you use it regularly (to be defined), but
> > be able to wipe it else. So, this would require being able to update a
> > timestamp like “last use”. This could be done in some sort of
> > distributed lookup table, where you register your username:RingID pair
> > at a given time (=timestamp), and using the fact you own the secret key
> > corresponding to this RingID, update this timestamp every time you
> > connect. Then, table nodes are allowed to clear usernames not seen for
> > more than the desired time span. Not sure what kind of decentralized
> > technos can provide this, since they are hard constraints on not being
> > able to write an username already present. Maybe the DHT works the same
> > way with RingID:username, but I’m definitively not an expert about that
> > and dunno how it works in details.
> 
> Just remembered this from a Ring blogpost:
> 
> “Graduate and PhD students seek to resolve the question of DHT
> Indexation. To contact a Ring user, it is necessary to know his
> 40-character ID. The DHT indexation will allow users to look for another
> user’s Ring ID through information he has made public such as his name
> or a public alias, while preserving his anonymity. Wondering how it’s
> possible? Marco Rebado, Sylvain Labranche and Simon Désaulniers are
> precisely devising a solution. In the meantime, feel free to communicate
> confidentially with Ring!”
> 
> This predates blockchain use but maybe is still being worked on. ;)
> 
> 




-- 
Simon Désaulniers
address@hidden
ring:d92721cd88395f7c4953004cde769c4976cbe82c

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