Supporting Data Owner Control in IPFS Networks

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).