Hello
I have some general questions about IPFS.
When someone stores on IPFS and recives the HASH is that HASH the only way to access the file in the IPFS network?
If that hash gets lost, for some reason, is there a way to retrive back the data?
Is there a way to search data in IPFS witout having a Hash address?
In general I’d like to know if it can be safe or not safe to store information of IPFS.
Thanks
The hash is the only way to get access to your data.
But remember you don’t “store information” on the IPFS. You have to keep your local node running or pay a pinning service to pin your content if you expect to retrieve it at some point in the future.
So if I don’t share the hash with anybody, I’m the only person who can access it, right?
No hash, No data…even for the publisher?
Security through obscurity is no security at all. Not sharing the hash doesn’t guarantee no access. Consider if someone mistypes a hash and gets your content?
If you pin the data to your own node, the hash will be listed in your pins. But yes, the hash is the only way to retrieve the content.
IPFS has more in common with BitTorrent than it does with MySQL, or MongoDB. It’s just not a database. It’s a system for sharing data among peers. You can think of it as a big Key/Value store also, but imo that’s still not a database. All your critical data needs to be elsewhere in a real database, even if you are also IPFS pinning it too, to truly protect against loss.
About security: like every other system, your data is not private unless you encrypt it yourself. IPFS doesn’t do any encryption afaik.
2 Likes