Taiwan Turns to Ethereum IPFS Tech to Thwart Chinese Cyberattacks

By Jason Nelson

Looking to boost its cybersecurity defenses against cyberattacks from China and other adversaries, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs has adopted IPFS technology to safeguard its infrastructure.

InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), designed by Juan Benet in 2014, is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that lets users backup and stores files and websites by hosting them across a network of nodes, eliminating centralized points of failure and circumventing censorship efforts. The storage and file referencing system for Ethereum is frequently compared to peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent.

The news of the IPFS upgrade comes in the wake of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island, the first for a senior-level official since 1997.

In an interview with the state-run Central News Agency (CNA) on Tuesday, Digital Minister Audrey Tang said that the ministry launched the new project the same day China began military drills near Taiwan, following Pelosi's visit.

"So far, it has not been successfully attacked at all, and it has never been stuck for a second," Tang said. "It uses a Web3 structure tied to the global blockchain community and the global Web2 backbone network.”

“If it can be taken down, 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 the Taiwanese social media platform Dcard.

The idea of using IPFS, Tang said, came after Russia invaded Ukraine, using cyberattacks to attack Ukrainian infrastructure.

According to Tang, the volume of cyber attacks on Taiwan government units on Tuesday, before and during Pelosi's arrival, surpassed 15,000 gigabits, 23 times higher than the previous daily record.

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