🔥 Pepper source 🔥

Pepper source is a secure and decentralized software distribution utility built on top of IPFS.

It allows software providers to quickly and securely share software with their users without having to worry about infrastructure, security, notification schemes and maintenance. In the future, it will also allow providers to offer incentives to clients who allocate disk space and bandwidth by storing and distributing software bundles.

Pepper source exposes primitives to provide storage, replication, security, notification mechanisms and incentives for software releases by leveraging the IPFS protocol stack and distributed file system.

Security

Pepper source provides a transparent mechanism for verifying content integrity of the software release and identity of the provider:

• The software binaries are signed by the software provider before uploading it to IPFS. The signature is performed using asymmetric crypto algorithms so that the client can verify the provenience of the software bundle. This process is all transparent to the provider.

• Binaries are stored based on their cryptographic hashes, making it easy for clients to verify the integrity of the software, even when coming from unknown sources (e.g. untrusted peers which are not software providers).

Notification

The provider can notify its clients that new software bundles (releases, patches, updates, ...) are available through a p2p publish/subscription mechanism. The notification contains the hash (content address) of the newly released bundle and metadata about the software bundle being published. With this notification mechanism in place, those interested in the software (subscribers) know when freshly baked software is ready for download and where from.

Replication

Anyone can store and serve copies of the bundled software. This is done through the pinning IPFS primitives and opens up interesting opportunities to build incentives so that the provider can rely on its users to securely store and share replicas of software bundles.

How to use it (CLI)

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More cool stuff coming up:

• Client side interfaces: SDK for software providers to embed to their client side applications which automatically fetches, verifies and apply bundles of software released by the provider.

• Binary encryption: allow only certain users to access the binaries;

• Replication incentices: by providing monetary (or other types) incentives, the provider can make sure its software bundles are

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