Handle private files in IPFS

[Ekleog]

So I think one thing that's hugely missing for some applications of IPFS is the possibility to handle private files: files that one would be allowed to access only if they knew the hash. Or maybe encrypted files (handled transparently at the IPFS client level)

For the example of application of IPFS that I'm thinking about: github is about to be bought by microsoft. If people wanted to switch to git-remote-ipfs, then there'd be a need for:

1. git servers that support pinning repositories on behalf of their users
2. private git repositories
3. a nice webui over all of this (plus some stuff over eg. XMPP / matrix.org for issues / PRs etc.)

The one thing that I think needs action from the IPFS team here is private files. This would also account for backups: I'd very much like to push my backups on IPFS and just have a few servers pinning them, it'd be so much simpler. But having to handle encryption etc. by hand is a PITA, especially when encryption wouldn't actually be needed if the swarm required already knowing the hash in order to fetch the file (and thus didn't leak the hash on each request), as anyways exchanges between IPFS clients are already encrypted (iirc).

One idea I'd have to implement it would be to just advertise the the hash of the current hash over IPFS, and when a client wants to download this hash-of-a-hash, request them to give the hash of the file. This, from a 2am-written-proposal point of view, looks approximately safe.

What do you think about it? Is private files a use case you'd want to support?

[Stebalien]

So as to avoid further fragmenting this discussion, I'm going to close this in favor of ipfs/notes#270 (TL;DR, we agree but the answer is non-obvious and a mistake would be catastrophic).

You're proposal sounds like: ipfs/notes#63