Build decentralized edge computing based on WebAssembly and Trusted Computing

TL;DR

This is the beginning of a series of blogs talking about my recent idea. This idea is about building a full decentralized add-on trusted wasm runtime on top of the existing IPFS node so that they can provide edge computing FaaS besides static storage services.

This could be a pretty long topic since it will cover both trusted /confidential computing and Webassembly technologies. I will try to make each blog short for easy reading. I will list each topic below so that you can skip or jump to whatever you want to read first. This topic list will be kept updating until the whole series completed. So stay tuned and come back frequently to check the latest updates.

0. Cover letter: Background and research history

1. How does our existing cloud computing work? Why do we want to decentralize it, and can we?
2. Move your data or move your code?
3. The naming of WebAssembly. It is not for the web, neither an assembly
4. Trade-offs: Trusted computing vs Confidential computing / Cryptography vs Hardware / TPM vs TEE
5. Cloudflare has worker, Fastly has Lucet, what about IPFS? Adding a computing model to IPFS doable?
6. Trusted wasm runtime on IPFS
7. Trust as a Service (TaaS)
8. How about the business model?
9. What else can we do since the trust is available? Potential use cases
10. Let’s work together!

Let’s start from our first step: 0 of N — The cover letter