A Sanitizable and Bilateral Access Control Scheme Based on Blockchain

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.

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.

Personal Health Records (PHR) system has attracted intensive attention due to its universal accessibility and low cost in economics. Because of high cost of storing data and access control, most PHR systems adopt centralized management, where an authoritative management center controls the entire system and PHR data is stored in a trusted third-party service provider. However, there are some disadvantages, such as fully trusting to a control center, suffering from a single point of failure, and data deleting. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed framework based on blockchain and IPFS (Inter Planetary File System), and a suite of mechanisms for data access control to PHR data. Smart Contracts are designed on the blockchain, and all data operations are treated as transactions. The symmetric cryptographic algorithm is used to encrypt the PHR data, and then all encrypted data is stored on IPFS nodes securely in distributed environment. The ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is used to encrypt the symmetric secret keys, and the corresponding ciphertext is stored and published in IPNS (Inter Planetary Name Space), so as to achieve fine-grained access control. Analytical and experimental results are presented, which show that our framework has ability to provide authenticity, confidentiality, fine-grained access control, forward secrecy, and traceability simultaneously.

Recently, most of the Internet of things (IoT) infrastructures are highly centralized with single points of failure, which results in serious security and privacy issues of IoT data. Fortunately, blockchain technique can provide a decentralized and secure IoT framework to deal with security issues based on the characteristics of decentralization, non-tampering, openness, transparency, and traceability. However, the blockchain consensus protocol guarantees the safety and reliability of data, but it also brings problems such as scalability limitations and poor storage extensibility, resulting in the inability to directly integrate blockchain and the IoT in existing conditions. In this article, a private three-tier local blockchain, Three-tier architecture Blockchain (TBchain), is proposed to solve the problem by splitting part of the transactions in the public blockchain and locking them in a higher-level blockchain TBchain. Additionally, the private blockchain TBchain is connected to the public blockchain to build a hierarchical blockchain network to provide privacy protection for the IoT data stored on the blockchain. Finally, we implement an IoT framework based on TBchain and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to realize the decentralized IoT, which guarantees the user’s access control right to personal data. Experimental results show that the IoT framework based on TBchain and IPFS realizes the user’s access control right to personal data by verifying in advance to ensure the confidentiality and security of shared data, and improves the security and privacy of IoT data and transactions. Moreover, we prove that the scalability and storage extensibility of the blockchain is positively correlated with the number of data blocks in TBchain.

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.

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.

Nowadays, cloud-based storage systems play a vital role in IoT data storage, processing, and sharing. Despite its contribution, the current cloud-based architecture may cause severe data leakage or jeopardize user privacy. Meanwhile, the cloud-based architecture heavily relies on a trusted third-party auditor (TPA) and runs in a centralized control manner. However, the TPA may not be a completely trustworthy entity, and a single point of failure might cause the centralized system to collapse. Fortunately, with the advent of blockchain technology, the decentralized storage model has gained popularity. A decentralized storage system successfully eradicates the rule of TPA, solves the problem of a single point of failure, and has many advantages over a centralized control architecture, such as low storage prices and high throughput. This study offers a blockchain-based decentralized distributed storage and sharing scheme that provides end-to-end encryption and fine-grained access control. In our proposed IoTChain model, fine-grained permission is based on attribute-based access control (A-BAC) policy by employing the Ethereum blockchain as an auditable access control layer. Smart contracts are tailored for the IoTChain model, which combines the Ethereum blockchain and the interplanetary file system (IPFS). We used an advanced encryption standard (AES) for encryption and the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol for secret key sharing between data owners and users. Also, the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism is replaced with a proof-of-authority (PoA) to minimize system transaction cost and boost system throughput. Additionally, our solution has been tested on the Ethereum official test network Rinkeby, and the results demonstrate that our approach is realistic and economical on the IoT data.

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.

In the healthcare sector, medical records contain sensitive information about patients, so guaranteeing the confidentiality and integrity of it is essential. To improve the security of it, blockchain technology is being utilized. The blockchain is a type of distributed ledger and it keeps data securely while also generating trust without the need of third party. It has data storage constraint and Merkle tree preserves data integrity but it is inefficient when searching transactions within it. Hence this paper describes InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) based storage and modified bloom tree data structure which is a hybridization of bloom filter and Merkle tree for efficient searching. To protect data privacy, initially it encrypts medical records using ciphertext policy‐attribute based encryption and then the data stored on IPFS returns a hash value. To diminish the false positive rate (FPR), the hash returned by IPFS is stored in two parts of the bloom filter. The first part stores the data by using “k” non‐cryptographic hash function and second part stores the transformed data with the same hash function. The bloom tree is created using Merkle proof for verification of medical record in blockchain. The experiments show that the proposed method reduces the FPR rate and searching complexity is O(log2).

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.

Blockchain Technology has grabbed a lot of attention in the past few decades as an emerging technology majorly for crypto-exchanges. However, in 2-3 years, blockchain technology has gone through a path of diffusion across domains which are way on the far side, from its initial fintech applications. Media, Telecommunication, life sciences, defense, healthcare, government, etc., are industries where rapid adoption of this technology is seen. The education sector can also benefit from this technology's pertinent features, such as immutability, distributed ledger, and transparency. Record management, course evaluation, assistive learning environment, transcripts protection, and verification are the potential areas where institutional organizations can utilize blockchain. VerifyB is a blockchain-based system that promotes interoperability between institutions/ organizations to manage and assure students' records without any third-party entity intervention. The system is deployed on Ethereum Blockchain. It defines how blockchain technology can be adopted and leveraged to store students' educational records using IPFS (Interplanetary File System). It proposes how students can share their transcripts with institutions and employers using QR codes. Also, institutions can sign those records with access control using web3, and the authenticated employers can verify those transcripts and the signatures on the same platform. This system will help students as well as institutions to maintain security and transparency at the same time. Based on the analysis, VerifyB is a reliable, completely decentralized, secure, and tamper-proof system that implements storage, maintenance, and verification of educational records.

Git has been the de-facto version control system for the Software Development industry. Although Git is distributed, developers' tools for collaboration, such as GitHub, are centralized entities owned by large corporations such as Microsoft. The centralization creates trust and privacy issues for software development companies (preserving their intellectual property), along with a significant" single point of failure" issue. In addition, such centralized systems are susceptible to Sybil and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks due to the presence of malicious individuals. Blockchain technology has many key characteristics (such as decentralization, transparency, immutability, and audibility), solving these centralization issues. However, the requirement of having a storage system to store the user's repositories over the blockchain creates a scalability issue (in terms of storage). Most importantly, it makes data (code) privacy more severe due to its open nature. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving decentralized alternative solution and framework named "DCGit" powered by Web3 technologies such as the Ethereum Blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to provide security and scalability yet user-friendly collaboration for software development.

While cloud computing is gaining widespread adoption these days, some challenges are emerging around security, performance, and reliability of centralized cloud resources. Decentralized services are introduced as an effective way to overcome the limitations of cloud services. Blockchain technology with its associated decentralization is used to develop decentralized application platforms. The interplanetary file system (IPFS) is built on top of a distributed system consisting of a group of nodes that shares the data and also takes advantage of blockchain to permanently store the data. The IPFS is very useful in transferring data between people. This project focuses on blockchain technology, distributed file sharing system IPFS, and their applications in software development. It talks about different types of blockchain, its advantages and challenges, and what we can do to overcome the challenges of decentralized technology.

The know your customer or know your client (KYC) is a guideline for the banking system to validate a customer using identity, appropriateness, risk assessment in establishing a banking relationship. With the growing concern of security, the KYC process is complex and involves a high cost for completing for a single customer. In this work, we propose an economical, swift, secure, and transparent platform for KYC document verification for the Banking system through InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and blockchain technology. The proposed system allows a customer to open an account at one Bank, complete the KYC process there, and generate a hash value using the IPFS network and share it using the blockchain technique. Upon receiving the private key, any Bank/financial organization can retrieve, store customer data (i.e., KYC) securely using IPFS network if the customer wishes to open another account in that Bank/financial organization. The proposed system can save time, money, and repetitive work during the KYC process when someone tries to open an account at multiple Banks.

Several academicians have been actively contributing to establishing a practical solution to storing and distributing medical images and test reports in the research domain of health care in recent years. Current procedures mainly rely on cloud-assisted centralized data centers, which raise maintenance expenditure, necessitate a large amount of storage space, and raise privacy concerns when exchanging data across a network. As a result, it is critically essential to provide a framework that allows for the efficient exchange and storage of large amounts of medical data in a secure setting. In this research, we describe a unique proof-of-concept architecture for a distributed patient-centric test report and image management (PCRIM) system that aims to facilitate patient privacy and control without the need for a centralized infrastructure. We used an Ethereum blockchain and a distributed file system technology called the Inter-Planetary File System in this system (IPFS). Then, to secure a distributed and trustworthy access control policy, we designed an Ethereum smart contract termed the patient-centric access control protocol. The IPFS allows for the decentralized storage of medical metadata, such as images, with worldwide accessibility. We demonstrate how the PCRIM system design enables hospitals, patients, and image requestors to obtain patient-centric data in a distributed and secure manner. Finally, we tested the proposed framework in the Windows environment by deploying a smart contract prototype on an Ethereum TESTNET blockchain. The findings of the study indicate that the proposed strategy is both efficient and practicable.