by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
The Codex organisation is innovating around decentralised data storage. The org and the blockchain community are building solutions to decentralise data storage and guarantee robust data durability. This article examines the current problem with modern data storage techniques, including their weaknesses and challenges. The piece further explores solutions in the form of decentralised data storage and erasure coding, the hurdles of implementing it, and what the future holds in an era of a more decentralised, open, and fault-tolerant internet landscape.
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The Problem: Honeypots and Powder Kegs
Data storage is the Achilles heel of the internet. Many of the images, text, music, and software applications we enjoy live in a centralised server. Our digital footprint amounts to increasingly stored data across these servers, including on mega-servers hosted by Google, Facebook, TikTok, Yahoo, Instagram, and other similar services. Most people take it for granted that we should store data in this inefficient and costly manner.
This storage centralisation into repositories represents an unnecessary and dangerous risk to our collective and personal data. When data — like money or other assets — gets stored in a singular location, that location becomes a powder keg and honey pot.
It is a powder keg because, at any moment, outages, hardware malfunctions, or disk crashes can destroy data or render it inaccessible. It is a honeypot because once data is accumulated and stored in a single location, it attracts hackers, scammers, and thieves, especially if PII (personally identifiable information) or other sensitive info, such as financial or medical records, gets stored en masse.
Ransomware is one example of how bad actors have exploited the situation. Ransomware is an attack where a hacker puts a bug into software, locking the owners out of that software and its data until they pay a ransom. Any time organisations store data in one location in large troves, those entities expose themselves to the possibility of ransomware attacks. Astra Security expressed the growing problem:
‘There are 1.7 million ransomware attacks every day which means every second 19 ransomware attacks. The first half of 2022 saw nearly 236.7 million ransomware attacks worldwide. Ransomware is expected to cost its victims around $265 billion (USD) annually by 2031.’
Decentralisation of data storage is not a foolproof mechanism for preventing ransomware attacks. It is a partial solution. In reality, a mix of decentralisation and strong encryption will help minimise attacks on data. Protecting valuable troves of data against the scourge of accidental outages, North Korean hacker attacks, government seizure of servers, and other unforeseen attacks must be a key priority for all organisations.
Storage Concerns and Vulnerabilities in Web3
Storage becomes more vital as the internet community moves from Web2 to Web3. In this ecosystem, people enjoy games or collect art that involves the maintenance and storage of NFTs. Web3 is the internet directly linked to blockchains that leverage tokenised assets. NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are assets that live on these Web3 blockchains and belong to individuals.
The problem, as Dr Leonardo Bautista-Gomez pointed out, is that NFTs and similar digital assets point to files, including images and videos, that are too large to store on a blockchain. Many organisations keep these assets in a centralised manner that exposes them to failure, hacking, or censorship risks. Bautista explained:
‘While NFT metadata may be stored and replicated over thousands of nodes in a decentralised manner on a blockchain (e.g. Ethereum), such metadata often points to a large file (image, music, video) that is prohibitively expensive and inefficient to store in the same manner.’
Another vulnerability within Web3 is that entities can target DApps (decentralised application frontends). In their current form, they are not connected to blockchains but instead connected to centralised storage services. Data breaches related to DApp frontends could become a threat without reliable decentralised storage solutions to mitigate them. Frontend seizures and censorship also plague Web3 frontends.
We expect the asset and token ecosystem in Web3 to grow tremendously in the coming years. This growth represents a future risk because data is more closely tied to value. Implementing robust data storage practices will ensure our data’s integrity and help maintain the value of digital collectables and assets. In their current form, stored assets are incredibly fragile, and a black swan event could have catastrophic effects on data storage systems.
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