Published: 2026 Mar 31
After spending some time with some guys who works on IPFS(Inter-Planetery File System), I got an idea to create a something for it, a file transferring system easy enough for a person who knows the basics but actually a really sophisticated and security heavy system under the hood.
So i had known about the IPFS project for long time but had never done much of value for it even if i'm very interested in dApps and decentralized systems. So i planned as usual to do something. File transferring systems are abundant when it comes to IPFS but what i created was something which was more than a usual ones. And in the end I created what I call a hybridized system which is just a partially deccentralized system.
I called it EtCAN or the Eternal Content Addressable Network, and here a user will generate a private and a public key as a form of identity (like PGP) and uses the reciever user's public key to send the data and vice versa and this was the concept, I used the battle tested TweetNaCl library as my cryptographic base. Curve25519 was used for nacl.box operations, and this provided pretty high speed, eliptic-curve based encryption for the assymetric encryption. And for the symmetric encryption i used the XSalsa20-Poly1305 for the local data(contacts, config, and the secret key) using a master password. i then used the PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 with 600000 iterations which was the OWASP recommended standard.
But what made it better was that it had a pretty high level security and privacy feature other than the encryption, it had a pretty well performing steganography engine built in it which was pretty good at the job and used the scattered LSB technique with a deterministic PRNG(Mulberry32) seeded by a random 32-bit integer hidden in the first 32 pixels. And Instead of writing bits sequentially (which creates a visible "noise" pattern at the top of an image), it scatters the payload across the image's Least Significant Bits (LSB). It also forced Alpha channels to 255 to prevent data loss during transmission or the canvas rendering, and all this made this better than a lot of the same type applications. And this was also pretty easy as the hard part was actually a pretty expected one.
As it presented itself the hardest part actually was finding the 'pinning' service, so i started with supporting the Pinata JWT but for a complete decentralization this was not ideal as it would only maks the app partially decentralized, so i dabbled a bit with the Crust network but for some reason whenever i typed keys and credentials, it was always malformed for some reason so because of this i ended up with a partially decentralized applications, and i dabled with a lot of other ones but didn't work at all even though i digged deep enough and was just searching for a good pinning service for hours, i don't know why but for some reason none like i mean NONE worked amd using the self hosting option just broke the thing so there i was, a fish CAN forever. so I'll keep it Pinata till i find a good alternative but it's not actually a big deal as with the steganography and the encryption Pinata doesn't have anyway of surveillance as they will only see encrypted blobs lf data and seemingly normal images going through, so keeping it like this or changing doesn't change much. of the practice. And also that i added multiple gateway system in the downloading of the files which made it a bit more decentralized.
The next big feature i added was the feature of uploading entire directories of websites for mirroring or distributing them, and i used the v1 of CID as it was the version good for site upload as it didn't need encryption. And with this features I think i have an actual high quality and sophisticated file transferring system, and please let messsage me on Matrix or something of you find a nice pinning service.