NIP-05 Backend

Backend for NIP-05 auth. 2023 by Rainer Feike.

On events of kind 0 (metadata) you can specify the key "nip05" with an internet identifier (an email-like address) as the value. Although there is a link to a very liberal "internet identifier" specification above, NIP-05 assumes the <local-part> part will be restricted to the characters a-z0-9-_., case-insensitive.

Upon seeing that, the nostr-client splits the identifier into <local-part> and <domain> and use these values to make a GET request to https://<domain>/.well-known/nostr.json?name=<local-part>.

The result is a JSON document object with a key "names" that then be a mapping of names to hex formatted public keys. If the public key for the given <name> matches the pubkey from the metadata event, the client then concludes that the given pubkey can indeed be referenced by its identifier

Why nostr needs this

Authorization will become crucial for the success of the nostr protocol. It's easy to create trillions of private keys and use them to spam every thread, every conversation, every project. NIP-05 Auth, possibly with a set of trusted servers, can make things save.

We use this software on https://nostrich.house