Sign and Verify Files with Your IPFS Gateway

Today, we're excited to announce our first IPFS Gateway plugin, the Content Attestation Plugin. This plugin allows you to sign and verify IPFS files through your IPFS gateway using any Ethereum Wallet. With this new plugin, anyone can verify and trust content on the internet.

Why Do I Want The Content Attestation Plugin?

IPFS has always been a fantastic tool for content authenticity and verifiability. You can’t change a file without the content identifier (CID) also changing. This allows anyone to easily trust the data as long as the CID is the same. However, there’s still a missing piece. We need to easily attribute who and where the file came from. Of course, NFTs have enabled this but are too expensive for most situations. There has to be a better way!

The Content Attestation plugin aims to solve this. By making it simple to sign a file and have anyone in the world verify that signature, we take a big step forward in knowing who, what, where and why a file exists. In a world increasingly dominated by AI-generated content, this becomes invaluable.

How To Use It

Using the plugin is simple. As long as you are on a paid Pinata Plan, you can go to the Plugin Marketplace and install the Content Attestation Plugin on any of your gateways.

Once installed, you can then sign CIDs you’ve uploaded directly through the UI or through the API.

Through the UI, you will need to connect your Ethereum-compatible wallet by clicking the Connect Wallet button in the header. Then, you can click the context menu of the file you want to sign and click the “Sign” button. This will trigger a signature request from your wallet. This is not a transaction. It’s simply signing a message tied to this piece of content.

Through the API, you will do something similar but with code.

Then, whether you are verifying the content and signature or someone else is doing so with their own gateway that has the plugin installed, you’ll be able to verify using the pinata-signature header in the response. Verification is technical and we expect this to be done by developers, but here’s a small example of how verification might look.

Conclusion

The Content Attestation Plugin works to solve a real problem in the world of media and content today–authenticity and provenance. This is the first iteration of the plugin and we can’t wait for feedback so we can refine and improve it.

And don’t forget there are more plugins to come, so keep your eyes peeled!