Most wanted APP for the SAFE Network

Not exactly an app, but a cloud OS that not only grants a safe access to your data, but also allows you to do stuff with it and access doing stuff with it from any device, anywhere. You would basically do your work using mostly the computing power of the farmers and their devices. This could actually mean even regular folks can work on projects that require huge computing power without a powerful machine, from anywhere.

Could it be done?

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No, not as the network is currently planned to be built: at the moment, the SAFE network is essentially “just” a file system, all the processing your computer needs to do is still done locally.

There is a vision in the future that they could add containerised computation, where the farmers securely execute code within an encrypted environment, but it would have the following drawbacks:

  1. It’s very hard to implement safely, where the code running in the container won’t be able to breach the container and access your machine directly.
  2. It’s even harder to implement in a way where the owner of the machine running the container doesn’t have access to your data as it passes through their machine.
  3. It’s slow as molasses, so trying to run a real-time application like an operating system on top of it wouldn’t be feasible.

The only way this would work would be if someone essentially implemented an operating system in Javascript and ran it directly in the SAFE browser. Your machine would still be running the operating system, but it wouldn’t leave any traces on your machine and all the data would be stored in the SAFE network. Again, this would be hellishly slow… unless instead of trying to virtualise an operating system, they essentially built a brand new, stateless operating system, specifically designed to run in this environment. This wouldn’t be an OS as you know it though, it would essentially be a very feature packed website.

The amount of work this would take would be monumental, if I started writing code for it today, I’d likely still be working on the proof of concept in 6 months time.

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I should have told you way sooner then :tropical_drink:

Let’s imagine the SN gets up and running and it gets widely adopted. Building something similar is the next logical step maybe? Resources should be no problem by then.

How could homomorphic encryption play into this concept? We’re currently experimenting with it on a project at work as a way to run computation on encrypted data in order to enable enhanced consumer data privacy.

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The problem is that your computer will need to have information about the functions it’s running in order to process, and having information about the functions as a side product ends up leaking information about the data you’re operating on.

It was previously theorised that you could create an obfuscator which could run code without your computer knowing what the code was actually doing, but this was disproven in 2001 by Boaz Barak, Oded Goldreich, Rusell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan, and Ke Yang in their paper: On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs.

There’s also the problem of where the source data comes from. You can apply homomorphic encryption techniques to modify something which has already been created, but there’s no way to create data from scratch (this is called bootstrapping in homomorphic encryption) using the same computational methods without leaking information about the data (since the programs have been proven to be impossible to obfuscate).

So, yes, technically it’s possible to operate on homomorphic encryption, but it would be very, very, very difficult to create such a tool where the actual code which was running didn’t accidentally leak information, and the bootstrapping problem still exists.

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Another way to approach this is to break the computations up, distribute them randomly, and reassembly the results. I expect there are many approaches, it’s not an area I know about, but I’ve thought about it wrt SAFE in the past.

I don’t see any blockers, especially if it is built in at the network level which is the intention, so that individual computations can be verified through concensus. That simplifies things a lot.

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I was under the impression that homomorphic encryption was still a couple of years away as it is very slow - but then again last time I read about it was a couple of years ago.

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Here’s a list of some of the more high profile homomorphic encryption projects, but I’m not sure how fast they run or how truly secure the data is (I.e. do the computations run in such a way that there is no leakage). Either way, it seems there’s a lot happening in the space, and we’re continuing to explore it on the 9 to 5.

Encrypted distributed computation would be a tall order for the SAFE Network, but also a massive game changer, I think.

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I’d like to have an app, that would back up all the possible data & settings off all Oldnet & Safenet apps on my phone, so when it breaks, it would be easy to download them to my new phone.

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Golem is working on something also: GitHub - golemfactory/gMorph: Fully Homomorphic Encryption library

You probably wouldn’t need to backup SafeNet apps, as most probably all the data would already be in SafeNet :slight_smile:

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SAFEFORCE - CRM system where your customers grand you access to the data you need to help them. And off course can retrieve that access at will.

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Seems like it should be possible

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Knowledge is power and education draws many people to learn more and has direct utility. We should make a SAFE Wiki which can be under 100GB without videos and images.

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This has probably come up earlier, but anyway I’d like to have an app that is like Twitter, but only shows me the tweets of the users I have chosen to follow. Not any “recommended tweets” or other crap.

If I remember correctly, there was some sort of demo brewing by Maidsafe a while ago?

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Shameless plug of my lottery system

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