Read-Only Mode (Disabling Content Reproviding)

[lidel]

In the advent of Tor tabs in Brave, Ongoing work on Tor transport for IPFS we started thinking about user privacy. First step was to add an option to opt-out from window.ipfs (https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion/issues/451).

Another low hanging fruit is to provide configuration setting to disable/limit content reproviding:

flyingzumwalt: could you get read-only mode added to the ipfs-companion wish list? whyrusleeping: a read-only mode would not reprovide data we read, and also not re-host data we receive; the important part here is that it prevents people from doing confirmation attacks on us to see if we’ve been on a particular site

Feature Characteristics

• An option on Preferences screen to control Reprovider setting of active IPFS node:
  • Interval: 0 will result in other nodes on the network not being able to discover that you have the objects that you have. There should be one-click toggle to set/unset that.
  • (Optional): Strategy – tells reprovider what should be announced. Valid strategies are:
    • "all" (default) - announce all stored data
    • "pinned" - only announce pinned data
    • "roots" - only announce directly pinned keys and root keys of recursive pins
• When Interval: 0 we disable "Share files via IPFS" and "window.ipfs", only "read-only" functions remain.

Open Questions

• What type of UI should we use?
  • Should it be a simple on/on (switching Interval to 0 and 12h) on Preferences screen?
  • Perhaps we could make this smarter and add a select list named "Content Reproviding Policy" with options:
    • "All (Default)" – sets Interval: >0 and Strategy: all
    • "Only Pinned" – sets Interval: >0 and Strategy: pinned
    • "None (Read-Only Mode)" – sets Interval: 0
  • Or maybe it is better to keep is as a toggle, but make Read-Only mode set Interval: >0 and Strategy: pinned ? This way user's node will annouce only content that was explicitly pinned.

cc @whyrusleeping @flyingzumwalt

[flyingzumwalt]

This mode is also important for a bunch of other purposes, especially

• for users who pay per MB/GB for data.
• for low-power situations

It also reduces a bunch of surfaces for potential surveillance. Read only users should be able to operate roughly as quietly as a web browser interacting with a centralized server.

[bigs]

FWIW, i've recently done some work with the go-onion-transport. it is admittedly in pretty bad shape, but i've got plans to rebuild it atop a newer tor library, bine. bine enables a lot of things, such as statically linking tor into a go binary (so you don't have to run a daemon), full tor control support, etc.

[lidel]

Note to self: "Privacy Mode" may be a better term for feature