Squad

Squad is a 100% on-chain dApp that helps teams manage and share their files with a unique encryption layer between IPFS and their workflows, allowing for access control within different teams. This project was built by my team during EthIndia 2022 and won $5,000 in bounties from IPFS, Protocol Labs and Polygon.

Problem: No existing or secure solution for companies to adopt Web3 for file management

In the world where Web3 and decentralisation is becoming mainstream, It is becoming more and more important to build proper org structures to manage different aspects of a DAO. Existing solutions for team management on Web3 personal projects by kids that are not well developed, and are just built on top of ipfs making all the information available to everyone. Existing encryption solutions are weak and can not scale beyond managing one person which makes sense as these softwares are only useful for personal use.

Encryption Scheme

My main work in this project revolved around building out and testing the encryption scheme that made this product feasible and secure for an enterprise to deploy. Since there is nothing of this sort as of now, we came up with a unique encryption scheme(closely related to ECIES) combining asymmetric and symmetric encryption to allow only people in a particular group of an organisation to access each others files whereas other teams will be unable to access them(will not be able to decrypt them)

Edge Cases

One interesting case that was very challenging to tackle was when a new person is being added to a team. When the user joins, he would not have access to any file in the organisation as his public key will be new. We were able to tackle this by dynamically decrypting all aes keys by the admin user who adds people to the organisation and re encrypting them with the new public key and storing them on IPFS

Final Thoughts

Overall fun project, cryptography is always a interesting challenge be it in hackathons(building cryptography) or CTFs(breaking cryptography). I am still very bullish on Web3, it is a groundbreaking technology and very elegant. I will continue to support and build Web3 projects that promise true decentralisation(even if VCs won't).