A Decentralized Solution for Web Hosting

On the Internet, web applications are served from a centralized location i.e., server, for higher maintainability. However, in the centralized architecture, if there is an occurrence of server failure or crash, the web applications cannot be serve to the end-users until the server goes live again. In addition, in the existing centralized architecture for web hosting services, integrity of the hosted websites entirely relies on the third-party applications which checks for any possible threats in the system. In order to provide data integrity within the system and to overcome the above-mentioned single point of failure, we proposed the decentralized solution for hosting web applications, which provides more data availability to the end-users and maintains the integrity of the data. The proposed model makes use of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for storing and retrieving web applications, which provides high availability and reliability. In addition, the proposed model uses the Blockchain Technology for authenticity and confidentiality. The smart contracts are deploy on the Ethereum Block chain, which aids the service provider to manage the hosting service system. The proposed model also comparatively decreases the time taken to transfer the file over the IPFS using optimal path-finding algorithm. The proposed algorithm has a lesser time complexity when compared to the Bitswap protocol used in IPFS. The use of blockchain with IPFS cumulatively provides better authenticity via Ethereum Smart Contracts, which reduces risk and failure.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a novel decentralized file storage network that allows users to store and share files in a distributed manner, which can make it more resilient if individual infrastructure components fail. It also allows for faster access to content as users can get files directly from other users instead of having to go through a central server. However, one of the challenges of using IPFS is ensuring that the files remain available over time. This is where an IPFS pinning service offers a solution. An IPFS pinning service is a type of service that allows users to store and maintain the availability of their files on the IPFS network. The goal of an IPFS pinning service is to provide a reliable and trusted way for users to ensure that their files remain accessible on the IPFS network. This is accomplished by maintaining a copy of the file on the service's own storage infrastructure, which is then pinned to the IPFS network. This allows users to access the file even if the original source becomes unavailable.We explored the use of the IPFS for scientific data with a focus on climate data. We set up an IPFS node running on a cloud instance at the German Climate Computing Center where selected scientists can pin their data and make them accessible to the public via the IPFS infrastructure. IPFS is a good choice for climate data, because the open network architecture strengthens open science efforts and enables FAIR data processing workflows. Data within the IPFS is freely accessible to scientists regardless of their location and offers fast access rates to large files. In addition, data within the IPFS is immutable, which ensures that the content of a content identifier does not change over time. Due to the recent development of the IPFS, the project outcomes are novel data science developments for the earth system science and are potentially relevant building blocks to be included in the earth system science community.

Blockchain technology is receiving increased attention over the past few years. Blockchain is essentially a decentralized, distributed digital ledger in which data is organized into blocks. The data stored in Blockchain is secured using cryptographic properties. Storage is the main concern when the volume of transactions increases. Handling data in huge amount may lead to increased overheads as data can only be appended to it, and the previous data cannot be deleted. So, it led to the development of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS is a distributed database with peer-to-peer file system and uses content-addressable hash value which is used to verify the data. Using IPFS, one can upload the data in the form of text, images as well as videos. While uploading the data in IPFS, the protocol returns a unique hash value for the data via gateway. This hash value is securely stored in Blockchain. Based on the hash value, the data can be retrieved. In IPFS, data is distributed among the network participants locally. The proposed work combines both IPFS and Blockchain technologies. This scheme uses IPFS for storing large volume of data, removes duplication, share files, and hosts them. The proposed work minimizes the central server storage space, improves data security by using unique content-addressable hashes for data verification and also reduces computing power.

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol for distributed file storage and sharing. It is one of the main pillars towards reaching the Web3 technology, which depends heavily on decentralization. IPFS ensures more control over stored data even across untrusted nodes. However, IPFS lacks various security measures, such as encryption, to ensure the confidentiality of the stored data. This paper suggests a parallel encryption engine incorporated within IPFS to enhance data security while maintaining high performance and speed. The paper specifically proposes a novel parallelized symmetric encryption framework that encrypts data chunks before distributing them across the IPFS network. Also, the engine uses hardware-accelerated instructions to ensure speedup and robustness. Various factors were considered to evaluate the research contributions, such as encryption speed, storage overhead, and retrieval efficiency. The obtained results signify the importance of incorporating encryption into IPFS to ensure data privacy without compromising performance. Furthermore, unauthorized access and data leakage can be prevented through encryption, enabling IPFS to become more suitable for sensitive data storage in decentralized environments. In general, the contributions of this research support the advancement towards Web3 by protecting users’ data without aggravating the IPFS system efficiency and performance.

In autonomous distributed environments such as peer to peer file sharing system, some egoistic nodes could possibly collapse the system. Thus to meet the various users requirement in a distributed peer to peer networks, an incentive mechanisms is used based on blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a new method on how to increase the efficiency of the P2P file sharing system through IPFS and blockchain, which includes trustworthiness and proximity awareness during the process of file transfer. We also present the issues faced by the blockchain technology and how to overcome such issues through IPFS. Peer-to-peer (P2P) based Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a technology of sharing resources or files in a distributed system, which contains a cluster of hashed files in each node of the system. A user who wants to retrieve any of these hashed files can simply call the hash of the file it wants. The high-throughput problem of an individual IPFS user is to establish the role of content service providers, thus IPFS uses the concept of Filecoin that offers storage on a distributed network of local providers. This Filecoin provider’s i.e., the miners who cooperate for successful transfer of resources are rewarded for their services. The service provided during the process of file transfer and the security strength and some of the incentives based on IPFS are discussed in this paper.

BackgroundDistributed ledger technology (DLT) enables the creation of tamper-resistant, decentralized, and secure digital ledgers. A non-fungible token (NFT) represents a record on-chain associated with a digital or physical asset, such as a whole-slide image (WSI). The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) represents an off-chain network, hypermedia, and file sharing peer-to-peer protocol for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. Today, we need cheaper, more efficient, highly scalable, and transparent solutions for WSI data storage and access of medical records and medical imaging data. MethodsWSIs were created from non-human tissues and H&E-stained sections were scanned on a Philips Ultrafast WSI scanner at 40× magnification objective lens (1 μm/pixel). TIFF images were stored on IPFS, while NFTs were minted on the Ethereum blockchain network in ERC-1155 standard. WSI-NFTs were stored on MetaMask and OpenSea was used to display the WSI-NFT collection. Filebase storage application programing interface (API) were used to create dedicated gateways and content delivery networks (CDN). ResultsA total of 10 WSI-NFTs were minted on the Ethereum blockchain network, found on our collection “Whole Slide Images as Non-fungible Tokens Project” on Open Sea: https://opensea.io/collection/untitled-collection-126765644. WSI TIFF files ranged in size from 1.6 to 2.2 GB and were stored on IPFS and pinned on 3 separate nodes. Under optimal conditions, and using a dedicated CDN, WSI reached retrieved at speeds of over 10 mb/s, however, download speeds and WSI retrieval times varied significantly depending on the file and gateway used. Overall, the public IPFS gateway resulted in variably poorer WSI download retrieval performance compared to gateways provided by Filebase storage API. ConclusionWhole-slide images, as the most complex and substantial data files in healthcare, demand innovative solutions. In this technical report, we identify pitfalls in IPFS, and demonstrate proof-of-concept using a 3-layer architecture for scalable, decentralized storage, and access. Optimized through dedicated gateways and CDNs, which can be effectively applied to all medical data and imaging modalities across the healthcare sector. DLT and off-chain network solutions present numerous opportunities for advancements in clinical care, education, and research. Such approaches uphold the principles of equitable healthcare data ownership, security, and democratization, and are poised to drive significant innovation.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer content-addressable distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. It is an open-source community-driven project, with reference implementations in Go and Javascript, and a global community of millions of users. IPFS and libp2p, which is the modular network stack of IPFS, are based on name-resolution based routing. The resolution system is based on Kademlia DHT and content is addressed by flat hash-based names. IPFS sees significant real-world usage, with over 250,000 daily active network nodes, millions of end users and wide adoption by several other projects in the Decentralised Web space, but not only. An adjacent project to IPFS, which was also masterminded and is also being developed within Protocol Labs (the umbrella company of IPFS and libp2p) is filecoin. Filecoin is a token protocol that supports a decentralised storage network. Storage miners are rewarded according to their contribution to the network and the mechanics of filecoin secure the network against malicious activity. The objective of this half-day tutorial is to make the audience familiar with IPFS and filecoin and able to use the tools provided by the project for research and development. The tutorial targets both developers and researchers, who may contribute to the project or use it as a tool.

In the last decade patient management systems or eHealth has gained huge attraction with researchers. eHealth spans from the remote access of medical records to actual data exchange of remote patient's data of their body sensors. In this paper we propose a decentralized application model that uses Ethereum private Blockchain, Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), and associated web technologies that aim to help healthcare providers, policymakers, and research organizations in Nepal. It presents the outcome of a survey conducted among the general public and a focus group discussion with medical doctors in relation to their current practices and limitations in storing and sharing patients' medical histories for examinations or treatments. The paper concludes with why blockchain technologies can be a better option for public and private healthcare institutions as well as medical practitioners to store and share patient records to deliver timely and quality healthcare services in a resource-poor country like Nepal.

InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer protocol for decentralized content storage and retrieval. The IPFS platform has the potential to help users evade censorship and avoid a central point of failure. IPFS is seeing increasing adoption for distributing various kinds of files, including video. However, the performance of video streaming on IPFS has not been well-studied. We conduct a measurement study with over 28,000 videos hosted on the IPFS network and find that video streaming experiences high stall rates due to relatively high Round Trip Times (RTT). Further, videos are encoded using a single static quality, because of which streaming cannot adapt to different network conditions.

This paper presents a decentralized architecture that uses an oracle for file uploading to IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) via smart contracts for blockchain-based decentralized applications (dApps). The combination of a blockchain and IPFS provides an efficient and secure solution for data storage, ensuring immutability and traceability, while IPFS provides distributed storage. Since blockchains cannot interact directly with external systems like IPFS, an oracle is proposed as a bridge for such an interaction. This solution is designed and validated in a realistic scenario, demonstrating its effectiveness by enhancing security and efficiency when storing data in IPFS and only recording critical information on the blockchain, ensuring integrity through its immutability.

To facilitate the consumers’ online shopping, it is very necessary to build a reliable and sustainable product evaluation management (PEM) system to store, secure, and retrieve the evaluation data of products. To this end, we propose a novel PEM system based on blockchain technologies. In this PEM system, the evaluation data of products including evaluation scores and comments are stored in the interplanetary file system (IPFS), and then the data hash addresses are returned and stored on the blockchain. Then, the retrieval of evaluation data is implemented by designing and deploying smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Since it is almost impossible to change any data stored in blockchain and IPFS, the proposed PEM system can protect the comment data from intentional or unintentional modifications. Moreover, the proposed PEM system allows users to efficiently and reliably retrieve the relevant evaluation data of a certain product by a given query keyword with the increase of data stored on the blockchain. In addition, to achieve high sustainability, the proposed system also contains an economic incentive mechanism, which is beneficial to form a virtuous circle in online shopping. The proposed system is simulated on the popular blockchain platform, i.e., Ethereum with Solidity programming language. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed PEM system achieves desirable usability, reliability, and sustainability.

Open Educational Resources (OER) play a pivotal role in the traditional teaching learning processes. So far, there are several problems in the conventional OER such as tracking and tracing of OER, proper attribution, sustainability, publishing time and single point of failure due to its centralized nature. This paper proposes a Ethereum blockchain based decentralized and distributed framework to alleviate the problems existing in present OER. In addition Interplanetary File System (IPFS) has been included in this proposed system for storing the hypermedia as distributed way. It reduces the storage time. In this paper, we design distributed and decentralized infrastructure for OER system that remedies all of these drawbacks through the use of the Ethereum blockchain platform.

Visualizing and characterizing DNS lookup behaviors via log-mining

Our paper focuses on the implementation of a decentralized cloud storage system using the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) technology. The project aims to provide an alternative to centralized cloud storage by decentralization, enhanced security, and user control over data which is a more sustainable solution than the existing system. In a centralized cloud storage system, data is stored on a single server controlled by a service provider. This centralized approach poses potential risks such as single points of failure, data breaches, and reliance on the trustworthiness of the provider. In contrast, our decentralized cloud storage system distributes data across a network of interconnected nodes. Each node stores a portion of the data, ensuring redundancy and availability. By leveraging IPFS, which utilizes a distributed hash table and content- addressed storage, our system ensures data integrity, fault tolerance, and censorship resistance. Users of our system have greater control over their data. They can participate in the network by contributing their storage resources and accessing their files securely. The project implementation includes features such as file upload, download, retrieval based on IPFS hashes, and user authentication. It also provides functionalities like displaying connected peers, managing file metadata, and enabling file deletion. Overall, our project showcases the potential of decentralized cloud storage, exemplifying its benefits and illustrating how it can be implemented using IPFS technology.

SummaryThe block chain is the emerging domain that offers the features like shared, immutable, and decentralized dataset that saves the asset's history. Security and storage are the most challenging aspect. The classical techniques' issues and challenges are an encouragement for developing a fresh block chain‐assisted IPFS model with access control policies. Hence, this research paper introduces an effective access control and authentication based on an interplanetary file system (IPFS)‐based block chain and access control system for attaining secured transactions. The developed method comprises five entities, that is smart contract, data owner, data requester, block chain and IPFS along with eight phases, to be exact setup, user registration, initialization, storage and data encryption, authentication, testing, access control, and decryption phase, to provide better access control and storage capacity. The proposed IPFS‐based block chain and access control system offered effective storage and secure transactions in the block chain network. The highest detection rate (0.870), lowest communication overhead (0.766 MB), and highest privacy rate (0.719) are all achieved by the proposed IPFS‐based block chain and access control system.