Enhancing IPFS privacy through triple hashing
Thomas Katsantas, Yannis Thomas, Christos Karapapas, George Xylomenos · 2024
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a popular distributed storage system, with worldwide presence. Due to the open nature and distributed routing of IPFS, malicious users can monitor the content other users are retrieving, violating their privacy. Unlike previous privacy enhancement schemes that rely on user anonymity, hiding the identity of the requesting user behind a proxy, we hide instead the identity of the content, using only hash functions. This prevents intermediaries from detecting what users are retrieving, without relying on any trusted third parties. Our solution also supports optional content encryption, which is especially useful for caching. We present the design and implementation of our solution for IPFS and evaluate its privacy and security properties, showing that our scheme enhances privacy and prevents a range of DDoS attacks.