Pirated Academic Database Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’

After her website faced repeated domain name revocations, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has registered her website on the distributed domain names network Handshake.

The pirated database of academic papers is now accessible directly through the service’s portals as well as through NextDNS, a privacy-focused, cloud-based domain name service resolver which converts IP addresses into domain names.

“The DNS is like a phonebook for the internet. The addresses in the phonebook are the server IP addresses. DNS was created to give IP addresses human-readable names so with our platform, you’re finding the IP address through Handshake, not through a certificate authority,” Namebase CEO Tieshun Roquerre told CoinDesk.

Sci-Hub is a worldwide database of academic publications, which pulls the research papers from under the paywalls of academic magazines and uploads them to the internet for everyone to download and read. It’s maintained by a single coder from Kazakhstan, Alexandra Elbakyan, who is raising donations via Russian payment network Yandex and bitcoin, CoinDesk wrote last year.

How does Handshake work?

Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said. Instead of using the web-standard certificate authority to authenticate user connections to a server, Handshake stores references to the IP address of the websites registered in its system. Namebase is a platform that offers users access to the Handshake network.

That way, if certificate authority firms try to censor Sci-Hub’s domain name through the legacy system, then people who want to access the site still can through Handshake’s records.

“If you get censored at the server level, you can switch servers. But if your domain name gets taken down, no one can access your site. As long as the name is intact, you can point it to any server,” he continued. Even if the band website finds a new domain, users may not know whether or not it is authentic (as an example, Roquerre said that Sci-Hub is no stranger to imposter sites).

To register a Handshake domain, anyone can propose a website name and place a bid for that website on Handshake’s marketplace with its eponymous HNS token. After a two-week auction period, the highest bidder wins the domain (whose blockchain footprint acts like an NFT, Roquerre said) and the tokens are burned.

Roquerre said Namebase does not issue tokens and it is instead mined through Bitcoin-esque proof of work.

A total number of unique 6,818 Handshake domains are actively in use while roughly 375,000 have been registered, according to Handshake data shared with CoinDesk. The same data show marketplace volume has grown 60% on average month over month and is anticipated to top $140,000 this month.

Building the decentralized web

A decentralized domain name system like Handshake could be a significant win in the fight for the decentralized web.

The project is part of a crop of so-called Web 3.0 applications vying to create a less centralized, censorship-resistant internet. Handshake, for example, has a complementary browser to create an uncensored internet search experience.

Urbit, still another web 3.0 hopeful, is more than a decade in development and relies on Ethereum to construct a platform for decentralized personal servers.

As evidenced by Sci-Hub’s own problems, the decentralized web is being built out of fears of deplatforming. As the internet’s access points are increasingly centralized in the hands of a few actors, certain applications – most recently, Twitter-alternative Parler – have faced censorship at the hands of web server providers, app stores and DNS certificate authorities.

CORRECTION (Jan. 12, 2021, 01:15 UTC): This article originally said Namebase built Handshake. Namebase only offers users access to the network.