Standards for storing signed and encrypted data on IPFS

Storing authenticated and encrypted data on IPFS is a core building block for many Web3 applications, but to date there has not been a standardized way to encode this type of data.

Without a standard, many developers have been forced to create custom formats for their signed and encrypted data. This has been prohibitive to the openness and interoperability of information stored in IPFS by siloing data to their particular implementation. Another approach to authenticated data has been to put data in IPFS and put the CID of the data in a smart contract on a blockchain, such as Ethereum. This is essentially an expensive way of adding a signature on top of the data and persisting the signature record on the blockchain.

With the introduction of EIP-2844, a standard that allows wallets to support a few new methods for signing and decrypting data based on DIDs and the dag-jose IPLD codec, we can now simply put authenticated and encrypted data directly into IPFS. In this tutorial, you will learn how you can utilize these primitives with two libraries, js-did and 3ID Connect.

This work was funded through grants by the IPFS, Filecoin, and Ethereum foundations.