A group of cyber activists are working to create a decentralized, BitTorrent-powered DNS system that exchanges data via peer-to-peer, cross-platform transfers.
Unsurprisingly, the initiative was prompted by a recent slew of controversial domain seizures by jackbooted federal authorities.
Indeed, the new network will be managed for and by the people – and cannot be downed by simply pulling a plug on a single, vulnerable server.
“[Our goal is to] create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the host’s DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other requests cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database,” the group explained on its Dot-P2P Wiki site.
“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted bittorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”
According to Dot-P2P, such a configuration will facilitate the easy implementation and re-use of existing torrent libraries as well as code – making the network layer look and feel as much like bittorrent as possible.
And as expected, the application will only affect lookups on the p2p TLD, thereby preventing it from being classified as malware that can takeover or modify regular DNS traffic.
[Via Dot-P2P and TorrentFreak]
