RFC 9498: The GNU Name System

We are happy to announce that our The GNU Name System (GNS) specification is now published as RFC 9498.

GNS addresses long-standing security and privacy issues in the ubiquitous Domain Name System (DNS). Previous attempts to secure DNS (DNSSEC) fail to address critical security issues such as end-to-end security, query privacy, censorship, and centralization of root zone governance. After 40 years of patching, it is time for a new beginning.

The GNU Name System is our contribution towards a decentralized and censorship-resistant domain name resolution system that provides a privacy-enhancing alternative to the Domain Name System (DNS).

As part of our work on RFC 9498, we have also contributed to the specification of the .alt top-level domain to be used by alternative name resolution systems and have established the GANA registry for ".alt".

GNS is implemented according to RFC 9598 in GNUnet 0.20.0. It is also implemented as part of GNUnet-Go.

We thank all reviewers for their comments. In particular, we thank D. J. Bernstein, S. Bortzmeyer, A. Farrel, E. Lear, and R. Salz for their insightful and detailed technical reviews. We thank J. Yao and J. Klensin for the internationalization reviews. We thank Dr. J. Appelbaum for suggesting the name "GNU Name System" and Dr. Richard Stallman for approving its use. We thank T. Lange and M. Wachs for their earlier contributions to the design and implementation of GNS. We thank J. Yao and J. Klensin for the internationalization reviews. We thank NLnet and NGI DISCOVERY for funding work on the GNU Name System.

The work does not stop here: We encourage further implementations of RFC 9498 to learn more both in terms of technical documentation and actual deployment experiences. Further, we are currently working on the specification of the R⁵N DHT and BFT Set Reconciliation which are underlying building blocks of GNS in GNUnet and not covered by RFC 9498.