Supporting Data Owner Control in IPFS Networks

In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) — Denver, Colorado, June 9-13, 2024

Decentralized storage architectures are emerging as valid complementary solutions to cloud-based storage services. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is one of the most well-known distributed file storage protocols with wide adoption, good performance, and a variety of applications built over it. However, IPFS does not natively support data confidentiality and its decentralized nature limits the ability of data owners to maintain control on their resources and to force their deletion. We propose Mix-IPFS, an approach that allows data owners to maintain control on their resources uploaded to IPFS, guaranteeing their confidentiality and supporting secure deletion. Mix-IPFS is based on AONT encryption, which has the nice property of preventing decryption if the whole ciphertext is not available. Data owners can permanently delete a resource by making a small portion of its encrypted representation unavailable. Our solution uses a virtual file system to guarantee transparency to data owners (i.e., they can operate on plaintext resources). The experimental evaluation shows that the overhead of our approach is negligible (less than 2% for both upload and access operations).

Paper

@inproceedings{ipfs,
    author = {Marco Abbadini and Michele Beretta and Sabrina
              De Capitani di Vimercati and Dario Facchinetti and Sara
              Foresti and Gianluca Oldani and Stefano Paraboschi and
              Matthew Rossi and Pierangela Samarati},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International
                 Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2024)},
    title = {Supporting Data Owner Control in IPFS Networks},
    year = {2024}
}