Dennis Trautwein

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized file system for building the next generation of the internet. IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. In this talk, we’ll dive into how decentralised storage with IPFS works under the hood as it builds on top of many long-known, well established techniques and yet is more than just the sum of its parts.

We’ll cover basic working principles like content-addressing and content-routing, followed by the results of an extensive measurement campaign. Answering questions like: How does content-addressing work? Who stores my data if I upload something to IPFS? How do you retrieve content if you only know the hash of it? How fast is that process?

At FOSDEM 2022 I presented libp2p's hole punching mechanism, overcoming NATs and firewalls with no dependencies on central infrastructure. One year has passed since. We rolled it out to live networks. We launched a large measurement campaign with many volunteers deploying vantage points in their home network, punching holes across the globe.

In this talk I will give an overview of the largest hack of the internet (aka. hole punching), dive into learnings running it on IPFS (~50_000 nodes) and finally present the data collected through our measurement campaign.

If you always wondered how hole punching works, how much more successful UDP is over TCP, whether IPv4 or v6 makes a difference, which ISP is most friendly to p2p and how to overcome symetric NATs, join for the talk!