Peergos Alpha – A decentralized file storage and communication network

We implemented a new http endpoint on the IPFS gateway which allows you to proxy a http request to any target IPFS instance (who is listening) using these p2p streams. This has threefold benefits: first it allows users to do private lookups for friends’ public keys without announcing to the network who they are looking up; second, it makes the whole system much more scalable – you only need to contact the real pki when you are signing up, or changing your identity or storage server; and third it improves resiliency, if the pki server were to permanently be taken down the network could move to a new one without any loss of data. Every directory or 5 MiB section (chunk) of a file requires a unique capability to access it consisting of:

Here the owner and signer are (hashes of) public signing keys, label is a random 32 byte label, and the read and write base keys are symmetric keys.

Source: peergos.org