quick thought dump

will develop this more soon-- i havent had time.

Author: jbenet

README.md

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+# car - Certified ARchives -- WIP
+
+**(WIP -- quick thought dump)**
+
+> A car for your data!
+
+`car` is an archive format, like [`tar`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)). It is designed to improve upon some deficiencies in `tar` as well as add fundamental improvements. The deatils of `car` are still being worked on, but the design space is already well scoped. `car` is a synthesis of good ideas. Many other archive formats introduced some of its improvements. `car` is different as it was introduced mainly to work with [IPFS](https://ipfs.io) and related protocols, like [IPLD](https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/merkledag/ipld.md). But `car` is useful beyond IPFS.
+
+File System Improvements:
+
+- **Seeking Optimized:** finding object within a `car` file should be easy and fast. We can do this via an index with in-file byte offsets.
+- **[UNIX/POSIX files]():** full unix + posix files compliance.
+- **[Extended Attributes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes):** support for xattrs and other extensions.
+- **Compression Optimized:** support for object-level and archive-level compression. Modular to support new compression protocols.
+- **Encryption Optimized:** support for object-level and archive-level encryption (through [AEADs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticated_encryption) / [NaCl/Box](https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/box))
+
+Fundamentally New Features: 
+
+- **[Data Structures](https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/merkledag/ipld.md):** support for archiving more than files-- arbitrary datastructures (first-class JSON, XML, IPLD support)
+- **[Merkle-Linked](https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/merkledag/ipld.md):** all objects in a `car` file are merkle-linked -- hash-linked -- together. this means the whole `car` file is a [merkle-dag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree).
+- **[Digital Signatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature):** `car` has first-class support for Digital Signatures, to verify the authorship and certification of its content.
+
+Whishlist:
+
+- **[Repo Friendliness](https://github.com/jbenet/random-ideas/issues/33):** make it _easy, efficient, and useful_ to use `car` archives as on-disk repositories for other tools.
+- **[Authenticated Datastructures](https://www.cs.umd.edu/~mwh/papers/gpads.pdf):** define all `car` operations as an authenticated datastructure, to have secure, untrusted computing. Merkle-linking and Digital Signatures get us most of the way there.
+
+Related Work:
+
+- continuity: https://github.com/stevvooe/continuity
+- `asar`: https://github.com/atom/asar
+- IPFS: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
+- IPLD: https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/merkledag/ipld.md
+- ipfs/unixfs: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/tree/master/unixfs
+- lambda-auth: http://amiller.github.io/lambda-auth/