A Secure File Sharing System Based on IPFS and Blockchain

Abstract

There is a great interest in many approaches towards blockchain in providing a solution to record transactions in a decentralized way. However, there are some limitations when storing large files or documents on the blockchain. In order to meet the requirements of storing relatively large data, a decentralized storage medium is produced. IPFS is a distributed file system which is content-addressable. It works very similar to the blockchain network. There are some attempts which take advantage of the blockchain concept and IPFS to design new approaches. Unfortunately, there are some inefficiencies in sharing data using the combination of IPFS and blockchain. In this paper, we proposed a secure file sharing system that brings a distributed access control and group key management by the adoption of the IPFS proxy. The IPFS proxy which plays an important role in the design is adopted to take responsibility for the control policies. The combination of the IPFS server and the blockchain network with the adoption of the IPFS proxy make a secure file sharing system which the members on the system can create new groups or join different groups by their own choice. Although there is no access control mechanism in IPFS server and blockchain network, the secure file sharing system manages the access control policies. The members access files only belong to the group they authorized.