The GNU Name System (GNS) is secure and decentralized naming system. It allows its users to register names as top-level domains (TLDs) and resolve other namespaces within their TLDs.
GNS is designed to provide:
Censorship resistance
Query privacy
Secure name resolution
Compatibility with DNS
Unlike DNS, GNS does not rely on central root zones or authorities. Instead any user administers their own root and can can create arbitrary name value mappings. Furthermore users can delegate resolution to other users’ zones just like DNS NS records do. Zones are uniquely identified via public keys and resource records are signed using the corresponding public key. Delegation to another user’s zone is done using special delegation records and petnames. A petname is a name that can be freely chosen by the user. This results in non-unique name-value mappings as www.bob to one user might be www.friend for someone else.
