Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Zooko's triangle

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Zooko's triangle

Zooko's triangle is a diagram of three properties that are generally considered desirable for names of participants in a network protocol:

Contents

  • Human-meaningful: Meaningful and memorable (low-entropy) names are provided to the users.
  • Secure: Any entity in the system can act maliciously, including the majority of the entities or the available computational power.
  • Decentralized: There is still only one, unique and specific entity to which a name resolves.

    • Overview

    Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn conjectured that no single kind of name can achieve more than two. For example: DNSSec, offers a secure, human-meaningful naming scheme, but is not secure against compromise by the root; .onion addresses and bitcoin addresses, are secure and decentralized but not human-meaningful; and I2P, uses name translation services which are secure (as they run locally) and provide human-meaningful names - but fail to provide unique entities when used globally in a decentralised network without authorities.

    Solutions

    Several systems which exhibit all three properties of Zooko's triangle have now been created, including:

  • Computer scientist Nick Szabo's paper "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority" illustrated that all three properties can be achieved up to the limits of Byzantine fault tolerance.
  • Activist Aaron Swartz described a naming system based on Bitcoin employing Bitcoin's distributed blockchain as a proof-of-work to establish consensus of domain name ownership. These systems remain vulnerable to Sybil attack, but are secure under Byzantine assumptions. Namecoin now implements the concept.

    • Several platforms implement refutations of Zooko's conjecture, including: Twister (which use the later Aaron Swartz system with a bitcoin-like system), Blockstack (which can run on any blockchain and currently uses Bitcoin), Namecoin (separate blockchain), and Monero OpenAlias.

    References

    Zooko's triangle Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA