[homenet] A TOFU approach to naming things in the homenet (with code!)

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <[e-mail]>]

Hey everyone

While following the naming discussions, I have been thinking about how
to do one of the things that the current naming architecture draft
excludes: Allowing devices on the homenet to register in (public) DNS so
that one may find them. And since I also wanted to learn the Go
programming language, I decided to prototype something. Enter the
'nsregd' daemon.

This daemon will allow a client to claim a name on a Trust On First Use
(TOFU) basis using the RFC2136 dynamic DNS update protocol. A client
claims a name by sending a DNS update request with a SIG(0) (RFC2931)
signature and including the public key corresponding to the signature.
If the name in a claim is not already taken by another client, the
client's claim will be successful and the daemon will cache the public
key and use it to verify subsequent update requests.

Once a name has been claimed by a client, that client can add and remove
A and AAAA records by means of regular DNS update requests signed with
the key used to claim the name. The daemon will forward these updates to
one or more configured upstream authoritative nameservers.

I'm posting this here in the hope that others will find it useful,
either as input to the discussion, or as a tool to play around with.

The code is available on Github:

https://github.com/tohojo/nsregd

The README file has a few more details on how it's supposed to work.
Comments very welcome, patches even more so :)


Cheers,

-Toke