Secure File Uploads with Flask: Leveraging Merkle Trees, Chunking, Zlib Compression, and Parallel Processing

In this blog post, we’ll explore how to build a secure file upload system using Flask, Merkle trees, and parallel processing. This system will ensure the integrity of the uploaded files by creating a Merkle tree of the file chunks and providing the Merkle root hash as a verification mechanism.

Introduction

Secure file uploads are a crucial aspect of many web applications, as they need to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the uploaded data. In this example, we’ll create a Flask-based web application that allows users to upload files and generates a Merkle root hash to verify the integrity of the uploaded data.

Implementing the File Upload System

Let’s break down the code step by step:

1. Importing the necessary modules

from flask import Flask, request, jsonify, render_template_string
import zlib
import base64
import os
from hashlib import sha256
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor, as_completed

We’re using the following modules:

• Flask: For creating the web application