IPFS on AWS and compromise warnings

Does anyone have any experience running IPFS on AWS? There’s nothing wrong with IPFS and there’s no problems running it there but I did get a warning from the admin that they received a warning about a possible compromise of the VM. I took a look around and didn’t see any signs that the machine had been compromised but I think the warning was generated by the number and location of inbound requests.

I was wondering if anyone else had a similar experience. Unfortunately I’m now hesitant to run an IPFS daemon. Again not for any technical problem but because it’s hard to convince management to ignore the warnings and reassure them that it’s not a problem.

I work with people that can’t get past the name “inter planetary” without giggling even though they don’t know anything about it. I’m sure they’re the same people who laughed at the name Google before they became a billion dollar company.

Did you initialize it with the server configuration profile? I believe this disables things like scanning for local nodes and other things that can upset hosting providers like AWS.

I believe so but thanks, that’s something that I’ll keep an eye out for. I don’t think it got flagged based on internal traffic but from external traffic. Unfortunately Amazon didn’t give a lot of information for why they flagged it. For all I know it was just some particular swarm peer from a flagged IP range but who knows. It was a while ago so the vm is long gone. I was just wondering if anyone else had a similar issue.

i guess they want to deter customers from decentralized apps. it threats their business interest.

I highly doubt that. I’m paying for it so this actually works against their profit motive. What’s not their interest is to have a ton of VM’s that have been compromised running on their infrastructure. They didn’t shut it down, they just sent a warning.

if you pay for something to someone that does not mean that he have to be happy about what you’re doing with what you bought. decentralized systems do harm aws corporate interests, because the more people utilize IPFS, the less aws services worth, which aim to the same targets: HA, CDN, security.
of course they don’t shut it down immediately - they want the ground to charge you and also the detection mechanism is probabilistic, not certain.

likely they just misinterpreted the traffic pattern as malicious activity, since most p2p app downloads as much as uploads. make yourself sure that you’re not hacked then ignore aws auto notifications.

Obviously we don’t agree. I don’t think that there is much of a threat to Amazon. Much like Linux didn’t kill Microsoft and mp3s and bittorrent didn’t kill the music industry, by the time IPFS has matured to something that Amazon would even take notice of they will have found a way to use it to their advantage. The irony is that while you’re focusing on it being a threat, Amazon is going to scoop it up, say, “Thank you very much for all your free hard work on this” and use it to make a ton of money much like Microsoft is doing with Linux to power Azure.