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Trustless File Server Pallet

This pallet intends to be a trustless file server similar to the Bittorrent protocol. The main idea is to make extensive use of merkle trees to provide cryptographic proofs of the file's validity.

Limitations

  • In the original Bittorrent protocol, the sha1 hashing algorithm is used. However, in this implementation the sha256 is used.
  • Files are divided in chunks, with a fixed chunk size of 1KB.
  • The whole files are stored on the blockchain storage. This is a very severe limitation and an overall bad practice. The original idea was to store files on IPFS and only keep the corresponding hash on the blockchain. However, I found several limitations for using IPFS in a substrate environment, so I finally decided to store the content directly on the blockchain. Further research would be needed in order to fix this limitation.

Walkthrough

This pallet implementation is composed of one extrinsic and two RPC methods. Tests have been performed using this file.

Extrinsics

uploadFile

This pallet call accepts the file bytes and uploads them to the blockchain (see limitations), along with its corresponding merkle tree and the number of file chunks.

RPC methods

trustless_file_server_get_files

Returns a JSON list of the merkle hashes and number of 1KB pieces of the files being served. This operation simply iterates through the StorageMap and fetches the corresponding data.

Request:

$ curl http://localhost:9933 -H "Content-Type:application/json;charset=utf-8" -d '{
      "jsonrpc": "2.0",
      "id": 1,
      "method": "trustless_file_server_get_files",
      "params": []
    }'

Response:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": [
    {
      "merkle_root": "18d35a4d731e0785fe855b4ed59033e96607137da7bb875c03f6cea5d1f8cacf",
      "pieces": 12
    }
  ],
  "id": 1
}

trustless_file_server_get_proof

Returns the chunk's IPFS hash, along with the cryptographic proof necessary to build up the merkle root.

Request:

$ curl http://localhost:9933 -H "Content-Type:application/json;charset=utf-8" -d '{
      "jsonrpc": "2.0",
      "id": 1,
      "method": "trustless_file_server_get_proof",
      "params": [null, "18d35a4d731e0785fe855b4ed59033e96607137da7bb875c03f6cea5d1f8cacf", 8]
    }'

Response:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": {
    "ipfs_hash": "bafkreihptszugz3ixlizu6eir5r4u5ygjzj55vews34bmur35jxgd3bwwm",
    "proof": [
      "72d2b6f941cb4954ece75eb4a4a10a5ee35e39575bf4e4397a3dd8b94c81a0a4",
      "f5a5fd42d16a20302798ef6ed309979b43003d2320d9f0e8ea9831a92759fb4b",
      "73b107c009c3044125c1f12015808b6adcfc44c473e013593f0ca1362bb80955",
      "fe98120ca95b4927928da36df60736b090a158d213c3fe2bb7683f27c90091ae"
    ]
  },
  "id": 1
}
Error handling:

This RPC method raises an error if the given piece does not exist or the merkle root is invalid.

Request:

$ curl http://localhost:9933 -H "Content-Type:application/json;charset=utf-8" -d '{
     "jsonrpc": "2.0",
      "id": 1,
      "method": "trustless_file_server_get_proof",
      "params": [null, "18d35a4d731e0785fe855b4ed59033e96607137da7bb875c03f6cea5d1f8cacf", 40]
    }'
{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "error": {
    "code": 1,
    "message": "Runtime error",
    "data": "\"Failure getting the merkle proof\""
  },
  "id": 1
}