Just wanted to highlight areas I find underrated but super important:
- Storage Subnets - Currently the Internet Computer has two types of subnet blockchains: system (with high replication) and application (with medium replication). This project is to add support for a third subnet type to support dapps with high storage requirements. Discussion lead: @akhilesh.singhania
Great to hear DFINITY is considering this. Storing images and videos is surely a common use case that I and other developers I’ve talked to have. There’s actually two potentially contradictory goals of a storage subnet: lower costs and faster reads. Right now, it takes significantly longer to serve an image stored on the IC via HTTP than from a centralized cloud, at least from this thread.
- Security Proofs - The Internet Computer is a complex beast that requires several non-standard cryptographic primitives to come together in order to provide its strong security guarantees. Provable security, also known as reductionist security, is a technique from theoretical cryptography where a new scheme, protocol, or system is mathematically proved to be secure as long as some precisely stated hardness assumptions hold. In this project, the Foundation will first provide security proofs for the IC’s core components, and then prove that the IC securely glues these components together to provide precisely stated security guarantees. Discussion lead: @gregory
I wonder if this could somehow also include the idea proposed here of a VM (i.e. WASM runtime) that can provide zero-knowledge proofs? I know the goal of this is more along the lines of formal verification, but it could be related.
- Boundary Nodes - The boundary nodes are the gateways to the IC. Their main purpose is to translate HTTP requests from users into calls to canister smart contracts on the IC and route calls to nodes on the corresponding subnet. In addition, boundary nodes provide load balancing, caching, rate limiting, IPv4-IPv6 translation (as IC nodes all use IPv6), and integrity verification for content served to users. This motion proposal sets the future roadmap for boundary nodes. It is proposed to enhance the design and implementation of the boundary nodes in several aspects, to make their deployment and operation more decentralized, make them easier to deploy and upgrade, and increase their security. Discussion lead: Yotam Harchol
This is so important. Every ingress request goes through a boundary node. Boundary nodes were partially responsible for the ICPunks “outage” a couple months ago. But right now, boundary nodes are owned by DFINITY and their inner workings aren’t transparent (at least to me). A great first step would be to release more information about these nodes.