Performance Evaluation of Off-Chain Storage Systems in Blockchain Environments
R Puneetha, R Tanuja, S H Manjula · 2024
The Internet of Things(IoT) generates an exponential amount of data, and the data is heterogeneous and dynamic. The data has to be processed skillfully to unearth meaningful information from it. But, it is challenging for a human mind to process this data. Hence, data is stored either on a centralized server or on cloud platforms for future analytics. Whereas, centralized storage methods pose challenges with the underlying design being consolidated into a single authorization. Centralization leads to data misuse or manipulation and single-point failures. As a result, there was a paradigm shift towards emerging technologies such as Blockchain-based solutions. Blockchain technology has consistently attracted the attention of researchers and technological giants as an inevitable solution to the problems faced by centralized authorization and in enhancing the security and privacy of the data. However, storing massive amounts of data on Blockchain is not a viable solution since it is expensive and redundant. The widely accepted and researched resolution to this problem is offloading non-transactional data onto a decentralized storage widely on an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In this work, we analyze the security and privacy risks of storing sensitive data such as healthcare data, on IPFS by employing rigorous real-time data loads and retrievals on IPFS nodes in a private network setup, Docker environment. The performance is evaluated on the grounds of data availability and integrity. The results show the trend that IPFS is not a feasible solution for storing and transacting sensitive data to an extent.