Prove website, domain, and network ownership

In an attempt to increase security and reduce spam, website services ask for more proofs. Most services require you to confirm your email address, but nowadays, some services also demand a proof of domain ownership. Sometimes you need to prove write access to a website. Registration gets much harder, and we have to do it so often. Time to rethink.

We have been used to creating usernames for three decades by now, but the practice has reached it limits: users need to do much more to get access to a service. A tiny simplification is offered via OpenID ("Login via Google"), but the new Open Console project offers a more integrated solution to build a trust relation between a person and a service provider.

In Open Console, a person (or group) collects personal (and group) facts, and can share them with the requirements of the service. When the service only needs a proven email-address, it only gets that email address, not your name. The negotiation about which data is delivered is totally transparent and far more diverse.

Besides personal facts, many different kinds of proofs can be maintained, like a proof of website-ownership. You only need to prove ownership once, and this can be shared with any service which requires it.

Proving website ownership is not easy. The focus of this talk is on the process of establishing this proof. There are many complications in checking the validity of a website. We implemented different approaches for this proof (via DNS, HTML-meta, and file). We would also like to discuss the possible proofs of domain and network (ip-range) ownership with the participants: how to express them in DNS.

Open Console received support from NGI OpenWebSearch.EU and the NLnet Foundation.