Ledger Nano app for IPFS

[SionoiS]

Hi,

I’ve been playing around with IPNS records and creating DAG-JOSE blocks and I was wondering if the community would be interested in a Ledger Nano App built to manage associated keys?

This app would allow you to create/update IPNS records and create DAG-JOSE blocks.
I don’t know if there would be other use cases for this ultra secure app. If you think of anything let me know below!

What form would you like this app to take? Lib, CLI, web app?

[danieln]

That’s a cool idea. Beware that the main challenge with IPNS records is that they need to be reprovided to the network because they either expire or the nodes holding them go offline.

This means that you would likely want two components:

1. UI to use ledger to sign IPNS records
2. Service/tool to keep on publishing the signed IPNS record.

I’ve been actually trying to get a better understanding of how IPNS record expiry works because there are two relevant parameters: ttl and lifetime but the spec (https://github.com/ipfs/specs/blob/main/IPNS.md) doesn’t mention lifetime.

Some related discussions:

Clarification over TTL and LifeTime for IPNS Records

When using the HTTP API for IPNS publishing, you have the option to set a ttl and lifetime value. Yesterday I was poking around the internals of the IPNS system within go-ipfs and noticed that there is only one concept of “time duration” and that is a TTL. There are functions that can be used to publish records within the namesys system. Here is the interface // Publisher is an object capable of publishing particular names. type Publisher interface { // Publish establishes a name-value mappi…

IPNS - how much is the lifetime

Yes, after 24h, the DHT won’t broadcast the IPNS anymore. You should republish them every 12h or so. This to prevent outdated records to pollute the DHT for a long time.

[ylempereur]

My understanding is this:

ttl is how long a node that has just looked it up will keep it cached before it looks it up again when it needs it (same meaning as for DNS)
lifetime is how long a node that has received the record from a “provide” will keep it before it discards it (in the same way block provides are discarded after 24 hours).

I remember reading those things a long time ago, but I don’t remember where

P.S. oh, and they get reprovided every 4 hours, not 12 like blocks

[SionoiS]

Thanks for your inputs guys!

I usually add IPNS records with lifetimes of a couple of months. It works fine but if you forget about it well…

Maybe one could create a bunch of records in advance an then rotate them as they expire, only works if the record don’t need to be updated.

[danieln]

@SionoiS

Maybe one could create a bunch of records in advance an then rotate them as they expire, only works if the record don’t need to be updated.

Is there any benefit to rotating over just setting a high lifetime? As I understand it, I don’t think there is.

[SionoiS]

Is there any benefit to rotating over just setting a high lifetime? As I understand it, I don’t think there is.

Yeah, now that I think about it your right.

The whole concept of “lifetime” is meh. I would like to “pin” my records and listen for updates via pubsub.