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Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

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Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#21

Post by mirimir »

brendoncarroll wrote: post #19
mirimir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess. But access controls really just keep the punters out. Any serious adversary will just track down the stores. And even if they're on dedicated servers with FDE, keys can be obtained from RAM.

Just to clarify: All data is encrypted on the client, going after a server backing a Store will get you encrypted blobs. Encryption keys would not exist on the server in plaintext.

Sorry to confuse the issue. I meant the keys for the Store's FDE, not the WebFS keys, which never leave the user's machine.

I was addressing jerry292's concern about access to the encrypted data in Stores.

Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#24

Post by [deleted] »

Eikon wrote: post #7
tootie wrote: post #2

Remember WebDAV? It was a similar concept, but never really found its footing and most of the implementations were pretty shaky. I always thought it was a good idea though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

The rfc is super dumb though. For instance, when handling a PROPFIND request (more or less listing files / folders), it’s not mandatory for the server to honor the Depth header (how many levels are returned). There is also no mechanism for the server to advertise whether or not it’s honoring the Depth header. That means the Depth header is useless because the client has no way to know whether there was only one hiera…

[deleted]

Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#25

Post by rkagerer »

brendoncarroll wrote: post #3

Hey everyone, I'm the author of WebFS. Happy to answer any questions.

Your page mentions files in a store are identified by a hash of their contents. Does this have any privacy implications?

Can another participant in the network tell what files are in my store? (like a party providing disk space, or someone intercepting my traffic)

Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#26

Post by brendoncarroll »

rkagerer wrote: post #25
brendoncarroll wrote: post #3

Hey everyone, I'm the author of WebFS. Happy to answer any questions.

Your page mentions files in a store are identified by a hash of their contents. Does this have any privacy implications? Can another participant in the network tell what files are in my store? (like a party providing disk space, or someone intercepting my traffic)

Encryption keys are derived from a secret and the hash of the data. The secrets are set per Volume. An empty secret would be a convergent encryption strategy, maybe suitable for public data. If the secret is set then the keys will be convergent with other keys generated with the same secret. This amounts to deduplication within a Volume, and privacy.

All a storage provider sees are many small encrypted blobs, so the size of large files is not leaked either.

Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#27

Post by amelius »

tootie wrote: post #2

Remember WebDAV? It was a similar concept, but never really found its footing and most of the implementations were pretty shaky. I always thought it was a good idea though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

I always thought WebDAV was sabotaged by different players for some reason (e.g. Apple's implementation caused loss of data). "Never attribute to malice", but support was so bad that almost no other conclusion was possible.

Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#28

Post by brendoncarroll »

mirimir wrote: post #15
brendoncarroll wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebFS stores data in things it calls "Stores". Stores can be anything that takes data and gives back a key to retrieve the data. Right now we have an IPFS and HTTP store built. An FTP server could also work as a store. If you or a friend run the HTTP or FTP server then it will persist the data for you. IPFS doesn't incentivize data persistence so if WebFS is working on top of IPFS it inherits that problem. You could…

OK, cool. I understand now. So if WebFS is running on a system with access to Tor SocksPorts, can Stores be onion URLs? Edit: If not, one could presumably route WebFS through OnionCat's IPv6 /48. But that only works with v2 onions, which are deprecated. However, tinc works with v3 onions. And either of those gives you UDP transport.

Yes, you could use the HTTP Store over Tor. I think you would have to configure the proxy environment variables for Go's HTTP client.

Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#29

Post by cryptoz »

amelius wrote: post #27
tootie wrote: post #2

Remember WebDAV? It was a similar concept, but never really found its footing and most of the implementations were pretty shaky. I always thought it was a good idea though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

I always thought WebDAV was sabotaged by different players for some reason (e.g. Apple's implementation caused loss of data). "Never attribute to malice", but support was so bad that almost no other conclusion was possible.

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity" has led me astray so many times in life I've come to largely disbelieve it is a useful mantra. It lets bad actors hide behind stupidity and cause chaos on purpose, while good people let it happen because "it's simply accidental, right"?

Re: Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web

#30

Post by mlyle »

tootie wrote: post #2

Remember WebDAV? It was a similar concept, but never really found its footing and most of the implementations were pretty shaky. I always thought it was a good idea though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

Every single major operating system ships with WebDAV remote filesystem support built in and it works reasonably. Subversion is built out of WebDAV and can be wired to naively auto-commit changes these clients store.

Maybe it's on the decline, but I'd hardly put it as something that "never really found its footing". It is still a decent way to do fileshares over the public internet without sshfs, etc.

That's not really what the link is, though. It's an adaptation layer to turn a random network resource into something that looks like a filesystem.

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