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Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming


Table of Contents "If we ever show a DID to a user we have failed." Names must be human-readable in order to be widely used. Unfortunately, while DIDs and Tor .onion addresses are decentralized and globally unique, they are not human readable.

But if we pay attention to what the boundaries and usage behavior of modern browsers are, a petnames system can be built which matches user expectations. And usefully browsers already provide something that is very much like petnames: bookmarks, which allow users to map a locally human meaningful name to a global identifier. To see how petnames (if correctly implemented) can help, we will analyze a specific scenario, in which a website (paypa1.com) attempts to pass itself off as paypal.com, hoping to capitalize on the similarity of appearance in the names.

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Petnames