I'm Building A Browser With No-DNS Protocol Built With A Decentralized And Zero-Trust Approach

I'm building - Dappy, a first-of-its-kind ultra-secure web browser and name system. It is a no-DNS protocol that has been built with a decentralized and zero-trust approach from the start.

(Disclaimer: The author of the story is the buidler of Dappy)

Domain Name System

The DNS is a service in which you send a request to a given corporation or association (also called DNS service provider), the request contains the domain name, if found, the answer will include the IP address corresponding to this domain name.

Either the corporation you query tells you that example.com corresponds to an address in its database, either it sends back a not found error. DNS is centralized, a DNS lookup request is atomic/unique, you put 100% of your trust in the corporation you query, you have no way of questioning the answer, or asking another service if he has the same data regarding a domain name. This is called a single source of truth.

The system is neither bad or good, it just works that way. In some case you’ll be happy that DNS service providers, registrars, lawyers and human employees constitute a chain that successfully turns your obscure IP address into a cool domain name.

In some case, often when a registrar is hacked, or lawyers decide to take your domain name and give it to amazon, you may desire a more trustless, decentralized system.

Dappy

Dappy is a service that, among other things, resolves domain names to IP addresses (we call them “names” and not “domain names” because they have no extensions). The system works in such a way that there are no single source of truth anymore, the mechanism is called multi-request. You basically ask many “DNS service providers” (5, 10, 20 etc.) for a given name, instead of a single one, and then perform a reconciliation at the browser level.

The accuracy, and trust one may put into this system is potentially superior to that of the DNS by one or two orders of magnitude. There is no magic, we simply apply the basic principle of decentralization, or distributed trust to a name system.

This is nice, but who decides that bob owns name bob, mike owns mike, and amazon owns amazon ?

Good question, this is where the blockchain thing comes in. It is all handled into a smart contract, either a name is available and you can purchase it, either it’s not, meaning that someone already controls it and can set the IP address (and TLS certificate) to point to his server.

No one owns this smart contract, once it’s deployed it’s basically here to stay, the underlying blockchain infrastructure keeps it alive. The corporations that get requested by browsers for DNS lookups just have to look into this smart contract to resolve, or not resolve a name to an IP address.

This basically is the dappy system.

This article was meant to stay short if you want to know more feel free to visit the website https://dappy.tech and join the discord community to ask question https://discord.gg/8Cu5UFV

Cheers, Raphaël

(Disclaimer: The author of the story is the buidler of Dappy)