Talk by Christian Grothoff on GNUnet's GNU Name System (GNS)

On Fri 2017-04-28 Christian Grothoff will give a talk on the censorship resistant and fully decenentralized GNU Name System (GNS), which is part of the GNUnet ecosystem and can help to (incrementally) regain privacy in today’s more and more surveilled and censored world.

The talk and discussions will start at 7pm and will take place in CCCZH’s hackerspace at Röschibachstr. 26 in 8037 Zürich-Wipkingen.

Christian Grothoff announces the talk with the following text:

In this talk, I will present the design of the GNU Name System (GNS), a
fully decentralized and censorship-resistant name system. GNS uses
cryptography to provide a privacy-enhancing alternative to DNS and
existing public key infrastructures (such as X.509 certificate
authorities), while giving users the desirable property of memorable
names. The design of GNS incorporates the possibility of integration
and coexistence with DNS.

builds on ideas from the Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure
(SDSI), addressing a central issue with the decentralized mapping of
secure identifiers to memorable names: namely the impossibility of
providing a global, secure and memorable mapping without a trusted
authority. GNS uses the transitivity in the SDSI design to replace the
trusted root with secure delegation of authority, thus making petnames
useful to other users, while operating under the strong adversary model
represented by authoritarian state actors.

Everyone is welcome to listen to the talk and take part in the discussions.

The event is open-ended.