Decentralized Internet Domain Names Using Peer-2-Peer DNS
There is a new wave of technological interest focusing on how to make it more difficult for big corporations and governments to manipulate the internet, after the recent WikiLeaks domain name problems and COICA DNS hijacks. One idea gathering pace would be some kind of peer-to-peer (P2P) Domain Name System (DNS).
There’s an on-going project called Dot-P2P which aims to create a .p2p Top Level Domain (TLD) that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on any Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) DNS service. Their plan is to mimic BitTorrent’s force-encrypted traffic as a way to combat DNS level based censoring similar to those used in countries around the world that cover-up human rights abuse including China and Iran. They have an IRC chat channel at THIS LINK.
The P2P model is already used by BitTorrent and is a de-centralized system compared to the centralized system used by most internet services. There are many obstacles in this model that need to be overcome, including how to store and update a list of IP adresses and Domain Names securely. Windows, Unix and Linux based Operating Systems utilize a HOSTS file, which is just a human-readable list of IP addresses and domains (or host names) that the network searches first before querying the DNS servers for a domain name.
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