Note: THIS REPO IS NOT MAINTAINED - the NuCypher dep has had breaking changes and this repo should only be used for refernce purposes

NCIPFS

Welcome to NCIPFS

This project makes it easy to secure data on IPFS with NuCyphers awesome proxy re encryption. This libaray is under development and are finializing the API.

Example Scenario:

David wants to upload a 1 TB file and allow Kathy and Joe access.

Traditionally he would ask Kathy and Joe for their respecive public keys and then he would encrypt the data twice; once for each key. Then store the encrypted value somewhere they could retrived it. He'll use IPFS as this datastore.

However NuCyphers proxy re-encryption allows us to encrypt the data once, then re-encrypt new keys that will allow the two parties access. In this system we only encrypt the 1 TB once, and only store 1 TB on IPFS, this saves us storage space, encryption time, and ecryption computations.

Resources

https://medium.com/@david.richard.holtz/hako-3825c3a033d7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Jl836ETLo

https://github.com/drbh/hako

Benefits

✅ You Only Encrypt Once (Y.O.E.O kinda like Y.O.L.O)
✅ Verified (immutable data store)
✅ Only re-encrypt keys for viewers
✅ Distributed - no single point of failure
✅ Can run federated (centralized) or distributed (ECR20 token incentivized)

Use cases

💡 Distributing large datasets
💡 Distributing data to many people
💡 IOT datastored (check out the original hearbeat example)

Implementations

🐥 Python 3 (stable IPFS and NuCypher codebases)
🥚 Node JS (waiting on stable NyCypher codebase)
🥚 Golang (waiting on stable NyCypher codebase)

Installation

Library

pip install ncipfs

Development

git clone https://github.com/drbh/ncipfs.git
cd ncipfs.git

We use pipenv to manage any of the deps

# install deps and access virtual env
pipenv install
pipenv shell

Implementation

On the top level there is a class named NCIPFS. This class handles the connection to an IPFS Gateway a NuCypher Network and access to Local File Store that handles all of the users keys.

Top level diagram --

API

NCIPFS Methods

connect(self, nucypher_network, ipfs_api_gateway)

create_new_user(self, name, password)

act_as_alice(self, name, password)

act_as_bob(self, name)

add_contents(self, alicia, my_label, contents):

add_data_and_grant_self_access(self, username, password, label, contents)

grant_others_access(self, username, password, cid, label, recp_enc_b58_key, recp_sig_b58_key)

fetch_and_decrypt_nucid(self, username, nucid)

decrypt(self, bob, item_cid, pol, sig, lab)

Top Level Functions

creat_nucid(alice, cid, enc_pubkey, sig_pubkey, label)

get_users_public_keys(name, serialized=False)

ncipfs_to_policy(store_url)