RETRACTED ARTICLE: A new cluster P2P file sharing system based on IPFS and blockchain technology

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The healthcare industry electronically maintains medical data which includes patients' information such as patients' personal information, diagnostic reports, and doctor prescriptions. However, the centralized storage model is currently used for storing such sensitive information. One main disadvantage of the centralized model is the difficulty in preserving user privacy. Threats relating to user (patient) privacy include unauthorized access of critical information such as identity details and diseases from which a patient is suffering, and misuse of patients' data and their medical reports. To address this issue, we propose a distributed off-chain storage of medical data using IPFS (Interplanetary File System) and blockchain technology. The proposed framework while preserving patient privacy facilitates easy access of medical data by authorized entities such as healthcare providers (e.g., doctors and nurses). Moreover, it achieves consistency, integrity, and availability.

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).

The sharing of electronic healthcare records (EHRs) is important to healthcare and medical research. However, institutions are faced with difficulties in privacy protection and efficiently secure data exchange. The main objective of this study is to propose a controllable secure blockchain-based EHRs sharing scheme. For this purpose, blockchain technologies are combined with interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to provide efficient secure EHRs sharing. Firstly, the IPFS-based EHR file system (IEFS) is designed to save and share large-size EHR files among medical institutions. With the high-throughput content-addressed block storage model and appropriate redundant backup of IPFS, IEFS is tamper-resistant and free of a single point of failure. Secondly, the blockchain is used to implement the blockchain-based EHR abstract system (BEAS) to manipulate EHR abstracts access. In BEAS, the EHR file addresses generated by IEFS are encrypted and saved in EHR abstracts for privacy protection. Since EHR abstracts are encrypted by patients' public keys, the sharing of EHR files is under the control of patients. In our experiment, a prototype system is developed to validate the proposed scheme. The experimental results showed that (1) EHRs are securely shared under the control of patients and (2) EHR files are retrieved at an acceptable speed supported by IPFS technology. In this paper, solutions to some important practical issues such as incapacitated patients, encryption key forgetting/missing, and efficient interaction of doctors with EHRs sharing scheme are also seriously discussed.

Blockchain technology is a groundbreaking and highly secure decentralized digital ledger used to record and store transactions across a network of computers. Its primary purpose is to safeguard, monitor, and oversee digital assets, providing robust protection against unauthorized tampering, revisions, or deletions. It serves as an immutable and tamper-resistant ledger ideal for storing digital evidence, enabling the tracking of evidence’s origins while strictly controlling access to authorized individuals. Current evidence management systems lack essential functionalities, such as authenticating intermediate user access and efficiently transferring evidence access between users. These systems also rely on the Base64 algorithm, which presents challenges related to storage capacity, time delays, scalability, and transaction throughput. To address these limitations, this research introduces an innovative solution: The integration of the Base64 scheme with sharding and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). This integration is designed to bolster transaction performance, scalability, and throughput. The Base64 scheme plays a pivotal role by encrypting image evidence, securely housing it within the blockchain network. Concurrently, IPFS decentralizes the storage of these images, thereby optimizing memory usage and enhancing transaction throughput within the blockchain environment. Experimental results showcase the efficacy of the proposed SHARD-FEMF, demonstrating a 25% improvement in memory utilization, a 21.5% reduction in gas utilization, and a 23% enhancement in transaction scalability compared to the existing Base64 scheme. Through the combined utilization of sharding and IPFS, the SHARD-FEMF framework represents a significant advancement in efficient forensic evidence management leveraging blockchain technology

Ride-hailing applications like Uber and Ola have gained immense popularity in India and across the globe as convenient alternatives to traditional modes of travel such as private vehicles which can be unaffordable many times due to rising fuel prices and maintenance cost etc., buses and trains which are crowded; and taxis and auto rickshaws which can deny you service at the driver's whim. The advancement in internet technology and affordable smartphones have made it convenient to book a ride through our smartphones in just a few clicks. However, the service has also brought with it a slew of other challenges like unpredictable surge-pricing and high intermediary fees. The current research into decentralized systems for vehicles is accelerating rapidly. Even then, implementing a decentralized ride-hailing platform proves to be a difficult challenge due to the inherently centralized nature of traditional ride-hailing systems. Blockchain and other similar decentralized technologies are an attractive choice for this architecture due to their immutability, transparency and fault tolerance. If implemented successfully, decentralization using blockchain technology would remove roadblocks along the way such as intermediary fees and surge charges by third parties as it would offer more transparency. This paper proposes a framework for developing a decentralized ride-hailing architecture implemented on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain platform.

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.