Content Addressed P2P File System for the Web with Blockchain-Based Meta-Data Integrity
This addresses data duplication and accidental deletion issues on the web, offering a decentralized solution for file storage and integrity, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing IPFS and blockchain technologies.
The paper tackles the limitations of HTTP for web data storage by proposing a model that combines IPFS for decentralized file storage with blockchain for metadata integrity, enabling data retrieval from multiple sources and securing metadata without storing the data itself on the blockchain.
With the exponentially scaled World Wide Web, the standard HTTP protocol has started showing its limitations. With the increased amount of data duplication & accidental deletion of files on the Internet, the P2P file system called IPFS completely changes the way files are stored. IPFS is a file storage protocol allowing files to be stored on decentralized systems. In the HTTP client-server protocol, files are downloaded from a single source. With files stored on a decentralized network, IPFS allows packet retrieval from multiple sources, simultaneously saving considerable bandwidth. IPFS uses a content-addressed block storage model with content-addressed hyperlinks. Large amounts of data is addressable with IPFS with the immutable and permanent IPFS links with meta-data stored as Blockchain transactions. This timestamps and secures the data, instead of having to put it on the chain itself. Our paper proposes a model that uses the decentralized file storage system of IPFS, and the integrity preservation properties of the Blockchain, to store and distribute data on the Web.