Solid over the Interplanetary File System

Solid is a moderate re-decentralization architecture for the Web. In Solid, applications fetch data from storage providers called “pods” which implement discretionary access control, permitting users to grant and revoke access rights and thus keeping control over their data. In this paper, we propose to apply an additional de-verticalization by introducing IPFS as a common backend for Solid pods, the goal being to prevent pod provider lock-in and permitting users to consider “self-poding” where the heavy persistency task is out-sourced to IPFS. We have implemented this Solid-over-IPFS architecture using the open-source “Community Solid Server” and successfully ran several Solid applications over IPFS.