By
Godfrey Benjamin
February 17th, 2021
In framework of its “Crypto Week”, Internet security provider Cloudflare set to facilitate an access to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for its users.
Though the Internet is a really great thing which opens almost limitless opportunities for us, there is still a huge space for improvements. Especially if we are speaking about privacy and security. The Internet today is still developing inspiring developers and solution providers to introduce new tools to make the Internet a more perfect place.
Cryptography is one of the tools that can be used to improve the situation. Internet security provider Cloudflare has taken a decision to launch its Crypto Week. Every day of this week the company is going to introduce new instruments that deploy cryptography and are aimed at making the Internet better.
The first technology introduced is a portal that provides a facilitated access to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and makes it easier to build websites on top of this technology.
Thanks to the IPFS Gateway introduced by Cloudfare, users do not need to install and run any special software on their computers if they want to get an access to content from the system. The IPFS Gateway is only the first solution that the company is planning to offer in the framework of its Distributed Web Gateway project aimed at support of new distributed web technologies.
The IPFS is a peer-to-peer system which offers a range of redundancies for those who want to have an access to some specific website or piece of data. The first special innovation is the following one: you will still have an access to the content even if something goes wrong with a node which is a great achievement because now, in the context of the existing Internet, a website may go down even if only one server fails.
But as we have already mentioned, Cloudfare has offered more than one feature to improve the Internet that we use today. The second one provides users with an opportunity to utilize not IP addresses to request data as it is done today but hash values. This solution functions as a way to ensure that users receive exactly the data that they have requested.
Now Cloudflare is going to provide people with a possibility to access data stored through the IPFS via offering them a gateway delivering content with the help of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) which helps to ensure that no third party has a chance to interfere the connection between the user and Cloudflare’s edge network.
Nevertheless, Cloudflare is not able to introduce any changes to content or remove it from the IPFS network. That’s why the company asks users to use the abuse reporting mechanism in case they have faced abusive content using the IPFS gateway.
The IPFS gateway is just the first of the solutions offered by Cloudflare and this introduction is only an initial step towards building the better Internet using the cutting-edge technologies.
