Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs wants to strengthen its cybersecurity against cyber attacks from China and other adversaries and has used IPFS technology to protect its infrastructure.
Better security after friction with China
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), designed by Juan Benet in 2014, is a decentralized peer-to-peer network. It allows users to back up and store files and websites by hosting them over a network of nodes. This eliminates centralized points of failure and circumvents censorship.
The news of the IPFS upgrade comes in the wake of the visit of US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. This was the first visit by a senior official since 1997.
In an interview with the state-run Central News Agency (CNA) on Tuesday, Digital Affairs Minister Audrey Tang said the ministry launched the new project the same day China began military exercises near Taiwan.
So far it has not attacked successfully and it has not crashed for a second. It uses a Web3 structure linked to the global blockchain community and the global Web2 backbone network.
Thus Tang
“If it can be hacked, everything from Ethereum to NFTs will be taken down, which is unlikely,” Tang continued. She noted separately that Taiwan’s technical partners include Cloudflare, which also supports Taiwanese social media platform Dcard.
The idea of using IPFS came after Russia used cyber attacks to attack Ukrainian infrastructure. According to Tang, the number of cyber attacks on Taiwanese government units on Tuesday, before and during Pelosi’s arrival, exceeded 15,000 gigabits. That is 23 times higher than the previous daily record.
