[tor-dev] Interested in GSoC - Hidden Service Naming or Hidden Service Searching

[Jeremy Rand]

Hi George, thanks for the reply.

On 03/02/2014 06:27 AM, George Kadianakis wrote:
> I'd like to see human-readable names in HSes, but I'm not very
> familiar with Namecoin. I don't want to discourage you from working on
> this, but I'm not sure if I would be a good mentor for this.
Any idea who might be a good mentor for this idea?
> BTW, I remember watching a presentation about namecoin, and it seemed
> like there are still a few serious unresolved problems (domain
> squatting is easy, no revocation, lightweight clients are
> impossible).
Domain squatting is known to be an issue, and there are proposals to 
adjust the name pricing structure of Namecoin to disincentivise 
squatting.  While these proposals are not implemented at the moment, I 
think it's likely that they will be implemented in the future.

There is a workaround (recently implemented) for a specific use case of 
revocation: a Namecoin name can import data from a second Namecoin name, 
in such a way that one name can be held in a safe location while the 
other name would be easier to update (but overrideable by the first 
name).  So if the easy-to-update name has its keys compromised, the 
safely-stored name can recover the situation.  This doesn't solve the 
more generic revocation problem; I will inquire with the Namecoin 
developers about this.  (I think it's possible to add full revocation 
support to Namecoin in the future.)

Lite clients do not exist right now, but are definitely possible to 
build.  The UTXO lite client being implemented for Bitcoin should be 
mergeable to Namecoin in the future.
> Also, namecoin are not anonymous, but people who get HS
> domain names care about anonymity.
You are correct that Namecoin addresses are linkable.  I think it's 
likely that Zerocoin or CoinJoin will be implemented for Namecoin in the 
future, which would solve the issue.  In the meantime, I think the best 
way to get mostly-anonymous namecoins would be to obtain bitcoins, run 
them through a mixer, and use the resulting anonymized bitcoins to 
purchase namecoins on an exchange.  (Most exchanges don't ask for 
identification unless you're using government-issued currency.)  I think 
some exchanges block Tor, so it might be necessary to use a proxy or VPN 
between Tor and the exchange.
> Yes, you seem like a good match for this project.
>
> Familiriaty with YaCy will be very useful indeed.
>
> On the crawler side, may I suggest you to also look into archive.org's
> Heritrix crawler?  Someone told me that it's what the cool kids use
> these days for crawling the web but I haven't used it myself.
Thanks for the tip, I will look into Heritrix.
> I think you would be a good candidate for this project. However, be
> warned that it's likely that more good candidates will apply for this
> project so it might be a tough competition.
Is there a way that I could submit two proposals (one for each of the 
projects I listed), so that if there's tough competition for one project 
I can still be considered for the other?  Or does GSoC only permit one 
proposal per student per organization?

Thanks,
-Jeremy Rand