As was previously announced, Jonas Ostman, Cassini, and I (Jeremy Rand) represented Namecoin at 35C3 in Leipzig, Germany. Same as last year, we had an awesome time there. As usual for conferences that we attend, we engaged in a large number of conversations with other attendees. Also as usual, I won’t be publicly disclosing the content of those conversations, because I want people to be able to talk to me at conferences without worrying that off-the-cuff comments will be broadcast to the public. However, the first fruits of those discussions started showing up on GitHub by January 2019, so hopefully you won’t be waiting too long. I would like to give a special shout-out to Diego “rehrar” Salazar and Dimi “m2049r” Divak from the Monero community, with whom I spent quite a lot of time hanging out during the Congress – very fun people to talk to.

Namecoin gave 2 talks, as well as a workshop, all of which were hosted by the Monero Assembly and the Critical Decentralization Cluster (CDC). We’re still waiting for the CDC to post videos of Namecoin’s talks, but in the meantime, here are the slides from Namecoin’s talks, as well as the notes from Namecoin’s workshop:

Namecoin Assembly Introduction

Speaker: Jeremy Rand

As 35C3 kicked off, the CDC invited each of the Assemblies to give a short presentation introducing themselves. Although Namecoin wasn’t, officially speaking, an Assembly (we were registered as part of the Monero Assembly), the CDC very kindly treated us as our own Assembly, and therefore we got to give an introduction presentation here. This presentation was thrown together in the ~15 minutes prior to the introduction presentations beginning, but I think it did a good job of explaining what we’re about.

Slides are here.

Lecture: Namecoin as a Decentralized Alternative to Certificate Authorities for TLS: The Next Generation

How we improved the attack surface, compatibility, and scalability of Namecoin’s replacement for the Certificate Authority system

Speaker: Jeremy Rand

Certificate authorities suck, but the proposed replacements (e.g. DNSSEC/DANE) aren’t so great either. That’s why one year ago at the 34C3 Monero Assembly, I presented Namecoin’s work on a decentralized alternative to certificate authorities for TLS. The attack surface was, in my opinion, substantially lower than any previously existing attempt. Compatibility and scalability weren’t too bad either. But we’re never satisfied, and wanted something even better. With significantly improved attack surface, compatibility, and scalability, our improved design bears little resemblance to what we had one year ago. In this talk, I’ll cover the various shortcomings in our replacement for TLS certificate authorities from one year ago, and how we fixed them.

Certificate authorities (CA’s) pose a serious threat to the TLS ecosystem. Prior proposed solutions (e.g. Convergence, DANE, HPKP, CAA, and CT) simply reshuffle the set of trusted third parties. In contrast, Namecoin solves the underlying problem: if you know a Namecoin domain name, you can find out which TLS certificates are valid for it, with a threat model and codebase nearly identical to the battle-hardened Bitcoin. One year ago at the 34C3 Monero Assembly, I presented a design (with implemented, working code) for accomplishing this in the real world of uncooperative web browsers, with best-in-class attack surface, good compatibility, and good scalability.

But there was still much that could be improved, ranging from ending our reliance on HPKP API’s (which are being phased out), to preventing the browser’s TLS implementation from leaving your browsing history on the disk, to sandboxing Namecoin’s certificate override code so that it can’t compromise non-Namecoin traffic even if exploited, to supporting Firefox and Tor Browser (both of which posed unique challenges), to name just a few. This talk will cover a wide variety of improvements we made to attack surface, compatibility, and scalability. Expect to learn lots of interesting little-known trivia about the innards of TLS implementations, which can be used for unexpected purposes in our mission to rid the world of the scourge that is certificate authorities.

Slides are here.

Workshop: Demo + Walkthrough: Namecoin as a Decentralized Alternative to Certificate Authorities for TLS

Demo of the latest Namecoin TLS code, and install it yourself

Workshop Hosts: Jeremy Rand and Jonas Ostman

In this workshop, I’ll demo the latest Namecoin TLS code that’s covered in my talk “Namecoin as a Decentralized Alternative to Certificate Authorities for TLS: The Next Generation”. I’ll also walk you through installing it on your own machine so you can try it out for yourself. Bring a GNU/Linux VM (or, if you’re particularly brave, a GNU/Linux system that’s not a VM), and preferably have Chromium, Firefox, and Tor Browser installed (you can choose to install only a subset of those browsers if you like).

Notes are here.

Thanks

Huge thank you to the following groups who facilitated our participation:

The Monero Assembly

The Critical Decentralization Cluster

Replicant

The anonymous person who obtained tickets for us – you know who you are, thank you!

We’re looking forward to 36C3 in December 2019!

This work was funded by NLnet Foundation’s Internet Hardening Fund.