RIF RNS: RIF Name Service

RNS provides an architecture which enables the identification of blockchain addresses by human-readable names.

.rsk

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The stack

Motivation

By adding a name resolution service, also known as “alias”, the probability of errors is significantly reduced. In addition, centralizing the access to multiple resources associated with a human-readable name improves the blockchain platform user experience. As resource names may change over time, the system needs to be flexible to support frequent changes.

Currently over the World Wide Web, the Domain Name System (DNS) is responsible for mapping human-readable names to IP addresses. RNS is a decentralized and secure service that works over RSK's blockchain.

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Design

RNS is a hierarchical namespace inspired by DNS, where the hierarchy roughly reflects organizational structure, with levels separated by the "." character.

The design of the RIF Name Service is shaped by specific goals:

• The primary objective is to establish a consistent namespace for referencing resources.
• Each piece of data associated with a name is tagged with a type, allowing queries to be limited to a specific type.
• To ensure the namespace is adaptable across different networks and applications, RNS supports the use of the same namespace with various protocol families or management systems. Data in RNS is tagged with both a class and a type, enabling the parallel use of different formats for data of type "address."
• There may be trade-offs between data acquisition costs, update speed, and cache accuracy. The domain owner, as the data source, should consider these trade-offs and decide what to store and how to cache it.

Elements of the RNS

RNS has four major components:

Component	Description	Specs
RNS Registry	The RNS Registry is a specification for a tree-structured namespace and the data associated with the names. Conceptually, each node and leaf in the domain name space tree represents a set of information. Query operations attempt to extract specific types of information from a particular set. A query specifies the domain name of interest and the type of resource information desired.	Specs
RNS Resolvers	RNS Resolvers are contracts that provide information from a name in response to client requests. Resolvers must answer a query directly or use referrals to other resolvers. Typically, a resolver is a contract's public function that is directly accessible to user programs or other contracts. No specific protocol is required between the resolver and the user program.	Specs
RNS Registrar	The RNS Registrar is a critical component within the RIF Name Service, managing the registration of .rsk domain names. This contract has the authority to register names in the RSK Owner contract, ensuring that new domain registrations are handled securely and efficiently.	Specs
Renewer	The Renewer is a contract designed to facilitate the renewal of names registered in the Node Owner. It is equipped with permissions to renew these names and provides flexibility in how the renewal is executed.

These fours components roughly correspond to the four layers or views of the domain system:

• From the user's point of view, the domain system is accessed through a simple resolution operation. The domain space consists of a single tree and the user can request information from any section of the tree.
• From the resolver's point of view, the domain system is composed of an unknown number of names. Each name has a corresponding resolver that provides information for a set of resolution types directly.
• From the registry's point of view, the domain system consists of a hierarchical tree where each leaf has an owner (contract or account) and an associated resolver that provides information of the name.
• From the renewal's point of view, the domain system ensures continued ownership through renewal processes, facilitating the payment of fees for name renewals via supported methods like ERC-20 or ERC-677.

Guidelines on use

Before RNS can be used to hold naming information for some kind of object, two needs must be met:

• A convention for mapping between object names and domain names. This describes how information about an object is accessed.
• Resource record types and data formats for describing the object. Find specs.

The guideline for finding a specific record for a name is as follows:

1. Calculate the name identifier with namehash function.
2. Get the name's resolver address via resolver(bytes32).
3. Determine if resolver supports desired resource record via ERC-165 interface detection.
4. Get the desired resource record. Find currently standardized resolvers.

Guidelines on integration

Resource records

A domain name identifies a node. Each node has a set of resource information, which may be empty. The set of resource information associated with a particular name is composed of separate resource records (RRs). The order of RRs in a set is not significant. Resource records associated with a name are found in the domain's resolver