This monday Cloudflare released a blog post announcing its “crypto week.”
The post clarifies that “issues like privacy and security that were afterthoughts in the early days of the Internet are now supremely important” and — consequently — “The Internet needs an upgrade.”
It is also pointed out by the post — in case there was any doubt — that one of the tools that can perform this upgrade is better cryptography. During the “crypto week” every day Cloudflare will announce support for a technology that “uses cryptography to make the Internet better.”
The first among those announcements is the aforementioned support for IPFS through an IPFS Gateway.
What is Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway
On the blog, the gateway is described as “an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer.”
What’s more, the gateway will let users also build websites that are hosted entirely on IPFS that are still available at a custom domain name. Cloudflare even provides free SSL certificates to those websites.
An example of a website that can be accessed by the Cloudflare gateway is a mirror of the English Wikipedia on IPFS.
What is IPFS
IPFS is short for Inter Planetary File System is a distributed file system that also defines how files move across the network. IPFS enables a permanent and more resilient web.
The main difference between HTTP — short for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol the protocol that the current generation of the web is based on — and IPFS uses a content-addressed system while HTTP uses a location-based system.
Simply put, this means that IPFS doesn’t identify the files based on the server that hosts them but instead finds the files themselves wherever they are based on their hash.
Such a design implies that there is no centralized server to attack — or censor — to take down some content since another copy of the file hosted anywhere else will keep the website up even if the original host doesn’t serve the file anymore.
