Cryptography

I’ve been following this thread that mostly boils down to this: if I have the SHA-256 hash of a file, can I use that to get a file from IPFS? The short answer is not really?, because Merkle-DAG. The slightly-longer answer is that because Merkle-DAG is required to allow chunking files and verifying those chunks as they come in, and SHA-256 does not have a facility to combine hashes of two components into a single hash for the combined block, you can’t find files on IPFS my the hash of the entire file in a way where you can verify that each block belongs to that hash without having to download the entire file.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about things that could be used to replace parts of the internet and web we currently use. There are projects like cjdns that are looking to replace the network routing layer of the internet with a system that does not require a centralized authority to issue IP addresses. There are other parts of the web stack that are looking to be replaced (IPFS is one of them, looking to replace HTTP(S)), but the one I will be looking at in this post is the Domain Name System (DNS).