Working With Encryption

Folks often want to combine IPLD and some kind of encryption. It's natural for decentralization and privacy to go hand-in-hand as goals!

IPLD doesn't have any opinionated built-in encryption systems. However, there are lots of systems developed by folks throughout the IPLD ecosystem, and many of these are reusable -- either in specs, or in implementations.

Here are some projects that we know about, in brief:

Projects

Peergos

Peergos builds many cryptographic systems together in their product, including one concept known as "Cryptrees", which is intended to be reusable.

More about Peergos can be read here: https://book.peergos.org/

A whitepaper which overviews Cryptrees can be found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ianopolous/Peergos/master/papers/wuala-cryptree.pdf

---

Ceramic

Ceramic uses systems such as DIDs and an encryption standard called DAG-JOSE, and demonstrates how to use them here: https://blog.ceramic.network/how-to-store-signed-and-encrypted-data-on-ipfs/

---

Fission

Fission builds filesystems and other data structures which include encryption.

More details on Fission, and in particular, the Fission concept of "private directories" can be found here: https://whitepaper.fission.codes/file-system/partitions/private-directories

And here: https://blog.fission.codes/web-native-file-system-presentation/

And here: https://guide.fission.codes/

Discussions

You can also find discussions about how to work with encryption and IPLD together in many places on the web. We probably can't compile an exhaustive list, but here are some documents we know about:

• in the notebook: exploration-reports/2021.09-dag-pb-encryption

If you're interested in any of those discussions, get in touch with their authors!

Your Reference Material Here!