From: p2p-hackers@zgp.org (Gordon Mohr)
Date: Tue Jul 16 00:54:01 2002
Subject: [p2p-hackers] Everything as a file in p2p

I love content-hashes as URI identifiers, but you're right, they
don't cover everything, like streams, series/events,  or resources 
that may change in place. 

One of the best ideas in Freenet is the creation of content-keys
(ie URIs) which mean "this name given by this principal  (ie public 
key)". You can think of them like HTTP URLs where the "naming
authority" is a key rather than a IP/DNS name. I think they're
called Key-Signed-Keys, KSKs, but I could be getting the 
terminology wrong. 

They are the perfect complement to locationless content-hash
names: they are locationless names for dynamic content with  
some measure of controlling-authority stability.

I think someone should generalize the freenet:KSK approach to
be a real URN type, independent of any one P2P system,  so that
even if Freenet goes nowhere, this concept lives & grows on
its own as it deserves to.

Or is there already such an URN type? I haven't run across one
yet.  

Perhaps it could look something like:
 
   urn:kau://<key-identifier>/<assigned-name>
 
"kau" for "Key AUthority". The key-identifier should support
parameterizable public-key algorithms. 

Resolvers would return the most-recent resource they can find
which has an accompanying signed binding from <key-identifier> 
asserting name <assigned-name>.

The name-assertion signed-bindings would be roughly tuples of:
 
   name
   public-key 
   timestamp
   content-hash
   signature(name, timestamp, content-hash)

- Gojomo 
____________________   
Gordon Mohr <gojomo@ . . . At Bitzi, people cooperate to identify, rate,
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