Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Services) – is a web service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is used to exchange encrypted files between the Signal clients. In contrast to the text messages which are relayed through the Signal-Server the files are temporarily stored using an external service. The protocol works as follows: the Signal client request an URL from Signal-Server, the server computes a pre-signed URL having a limited validity and sends it to the client, the client uploads the encrypted file to Amazon S3 and then sends the link to its peer. Amazon S3 services are accessed over HTTP and are billed based on usage. If you do not need file transfers this component can be omitted.
Wouldn’t that be another great use case match for Tardigrade and add to the already secure messenger? Instead of storing user files in a centralized fashion, store them decentralized.
It seems that Signal gets developed by the Signalfoundation. Maybe it is worth to contact them?
I had that idea and was wondering if all those Tardigrade nodes could even serve not just as file storage but also as messaging nodes for a secure messenger.
When I googled “Signal” I came across this site: Integrate AWS Bucket S3 | Leadsbridge. They offer heaps of different integrations for their customers and claim to be official vendor for companies like Citibank, Porsche, Mazda. Maybe worth to look at that too. A S3 Tardigrade integration could open a door to access these large corporate customers and make them aware of the Tardigrade cloud storage solution.
Signal seems interesting. If clients have to connect to that s3 backend, it might be more resource friendly for smartphones to not connect to the tardigrade network using uplink (because they need lots of connections to all the nodes) but a s3 gateway (which storjlabs is planning to deploy). But since it’s only used for files, it might be ok either way I guess.
(I hope you’re applying for a job at storjlabs jammerdan )
A partnership with Signal would be amazing. Also for reputation. For Signal it would be a step to even more security. And for Storj it would be a valuable name to be associated with.
By the way, Signal server is open source making any third party object storage solution possible.
They already support minIO, an object storage server that is compatible with AWS S3. Shouldn’t be very hard to either add support to storj through minIO (it would have a broader developer reach) or in Signal Server directly.
However if Storj Labs manages to have the official Signal server hosted in tardigrade that would be awesome news.
To have a hosting you need a compute service unless your site is static (unlikely in case of Signal).
The Tardigrade provide only storage, not computing.
I do not know, how much storage is used by Signal.
@Alexey I phrased it badly in the last paragraph indeed. I meant only object storage, they would have to host the remaining infrastructure elsewhere or keep what they have currently.
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. Thanks.