[tor-dev] Prop279 and DNS

[Jeremy Rand]

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Hugo Landau:
> After giving it some thought, I think Tor should use a
> Tor-specific protocol to interface with name plugins, not DNS.
> 
> My reasoning is as follows: the Tor daemon knows what it wants and
> is designed to source specific data from a name plugin. Where Tor
> specifies a custom protocol for this, this will match perfectly the
> type of queries and type of responses which Tor needs to ultimately
> obtain and convert to some corresponding internal in-memory
> representation.
> 
> As such, forcing this made-for-Tor format to be marshalled into a 
> pre-existing format, namely that of DNS queries and responses, can
> only ever reduce the power and flexibility of the plugin interface.
> It only creates the potential for impedence discontinuities, and
> also creates a substantial nuisance and implementation barrier for
> plugins which are intended only for use with the Tor daemon. These
> plugins would need to source a DNS packet marshalling/unmarshalling
> library, which creates an unnecessary barrier to implementation,
> and both sides of the interface would be marshalling into a format
> which isn't especially aligned with the internal representations
> they'd ideally like to be speaking. As such, using DNS here feels
> rather pointless.
> 
> Looking at the Prop279 proposal as it stands, it would be trivial
> for a plugin that wants to work with DNS packets to convert a query
> to a DNS packet. As such, I see very little utility to adopting the
> DNS format for this.

Thanks Hugo.  Yeah, I think you're probably right.  In Namecoin's
case, it *may* make sense to have a Prop279 provider implementation
that uses DNS to talk to Namecoin software, but the difficulty of
doing stream isolation properly with DNS and the rather large set of
DNS features that have no relevance to many Prop279 providers suggest
that it's unwise to force that coupling.

Cheers,
- -- 
- -Jeremy Rand
Lead Application Engineer at Namecoin
Mobile email: jeremyrandmobile at airmail.cc
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