Ask HN: DNS names used as electronic “title”

1 points by throwawaycities ↗ HN
Hi,

Attorney here with a question and figure if anyone has seen this concept in the wild a good chance it’s the HN community.

It’s an idea that is admittedly inspired somewhat by “tokenization of real-world assets” which is starting to get discussed a lot in legal circles using blockchain tech.

They idea is actually very appealing to corporate clients, but I think as the HN crowd knows blockchain also carry’s a lot of stigma. I began to wonder, why not replace blockchain tokens with DNS names as title. DNS names are known, understood, and trusted.

It might sound silly and I’m not looking for a “databases already do that” type of answer. Also I know ICANN has some restrictions/rules/policies that might make such a use case impractical, but my question is has it been done before/does someone offer a service using domains as representation of tangible or intangible asset ownership?

3 comments

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DNS responses are trivially spoofed, intercepted, altered, etc. And that may not even be the fault of your immediate upstream resolver.
Dnssec could solve this problem. But then we need an special errormessage that declares tjat the information is not trusted
I'm working on a couple of projects that are along these lines:

- Domain Verification Protocol [1][2] – proving authority over a domain. This is an application of our broader technology (still in development) where the domain can represent any thing (not just a company, e.g. an asset).

- NUM [3][4] a way to store structured data in DNS so that the domain name is the unique key to make a telephone call, GPS locate, make a payment, etc

The usual response to concepts for storing anything in DNS is MITM attacks but these can be mitigated. See DNSSEC, DNS over HTTPs, DNS over TLS.

Email in my profile, you're welcome to reach out to discuss.

1. https://www.domainverification.org

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35827952

3. https://www.num.uk

4. https://www.numprotocol.com