Re:Ask HN: Is a P2P browser possible?
by edvinbesic on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @08:44AM
(#15905490)
Doesn't IPFS solve some of the authenticity issues at least. Not very familiar with it but (from my shallow understanding) if the signatures matches some published version it is guaranteed to be the same file.
[1] https://ipfs.io
1) Most websites are actually web applications which have to maintain state via cookies over a TLS secured TCP connection. This means that any indirection must involve tunneling TCP connections, which timeout fairly quickly and require several round-trips to setup.
2) Even when websites are read-only and have no state to maintain, there is no common way for a peer to prove that content is authentic. Unfortunately, the authenticity 'guarantee' that TLS provides does not transfer to a third party [1]. There is a proof of concept server implementation for non-repudation over TLS [2], but every website would have to choose to implement it, and there aren't many incentives to do so.
The best you could do here is trying to reach a consensus about what the content of a page is, but you would have to account for subtle or not-so-subtle differences between requests by different clients at a different time.
[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/5455/does-a-trace...
[2] https://tls-n.org/