Hello again! and welcome to the weekly Security Sprint :p
Today I'm going to introduce a very exciting thing. But before, let's go back in time for a moment. We are in the late 80's, internet is very exciting, everyone want to have a webpage... Communication has changed, and we are going into a new lifestyle, in which we can be anonymous, there are no walls between users and knowledge is open. But... uh-oh, some countries are not very happy with this statements... Internet begins to have such importance, it shapes society. If you where an ambitious company or country, wouldn't you think... Who has internet control has society influence, right?
Step by step, internet as we know it is currently being limited, censored and monitored. To prevent and fight against this, there are associations, activists and such... and one of the proposals is... IPFS protocol.
IPFS is, as the official website describes "peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol
to make the web faster, safer, and more open". It wants to offer a distributed alternative protocol, making it more resilient which is handy in case of developing countries, for example. Here's an info-graphic from the official webpage:
Installation works in different OS, but I'm focusing on Linux. The documentation is clear, and it has a script for installing it. After the installation, we should create a repository in which we are storing the data/settings. For this, we are going to use:
$ ipfs init
initializing ipfs node at /Users/jbenet/.go-ipfs
generating 2048-bit RSA keypair...done
...
Our node ID is the peer identity hash. If we've been successful, we should be able to start as told in the repo installation:
ipfs cat /ipfs/ourhash/readme
Remember to change ourhash with our peer identity hash. Once we did our basic setup as told in the readme, we are ready to go online...
$ ipfs daemon
Initializing daemon...
...
Yay! we are in the network... You can see the ipfs address or your peers using ipfs swarm peers command. There's also a web interface console, we can access in the link http://localhost:5001/ipfs/yourhash.
And we can add stuff in "Files".
The security in IPFS is still weak, as they are still claiming auditing. It's a nice opportunity to investigate about distributed technologies!
Hope you guys enjoyed this introduction to IPFS, I'd love to write soon about it again, deeper.
Top comments (6)
Have a look at Project MaidSafe ( Official pages ), it could be interesting for you if you're into p2p anonymised networks.
It's not ready for deployment (yet!) but their cryptographic proposals and design of SAFE Network looks really promising!
I would love something like ipfs to be usable in the near future.
right? It could be exciting.
hey! well, it's not the same. Let me explain. What TOR does is a layered (and ciphered) IP mixing, so the final IP of your connection is different from your original one, similar to proxies system. It actually works due to decentralized nodes (either final nodes or middle ones) and it aims to preserve privacy. Of course, it's only useful when used correctly (not signing up in sites and such). On the other hand, IPFS consist of data and information nodes that work using peer-to-peer system in order to decentralize information, but not quite aims to IP obfuscation. They both uses a distributed open philosophy, but the have different goals. I don't know if I'm being clear here :)