While cloud computing is gaining widespread adoption these days, some
challenges are emerging around the 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 takes advantage of blockchain to permanently
store the data. The IPFS is very useful in transferring remote data. This work focuses
on applying blockchain technology to the IPFS to improve its security and
performance. It illustrates different types of blockchain and their advantages and
challenges; it also describes the proposed design and its detailed implementation. For
performance evaluation, we show the performance gains, analyze security
enhancements, and discuss the tradeoffs between security and performance. The
presented work is significant towards more secure, efficient web applications utilizing
emerging blockchain technologies.
Keywords: Blockchain technology, Distributed system, Decentralized service, Interplanetary file system (IPFS).
