The State of Privacy in IPFS

Abstract

InterPlanetary Filesystem (IPFS) is a permissionless set of peer-to-peer protocols. Its main goal is to provide a distributed alternative to HTTP. However, IPFS entails substantial privacy risks, as content requests and offerings are openly shared and not obscured. That means that no one within the IPFS network is anonymous, nor can sensitive content be offered privately. We review scientific papers, talks at IPFS conferences, and blog articles to give a thorough overview of privacy improvements for content requests and offerings. Our results indicate that complete anonymity is impossible within the IPFS network and that the most promising mitigations revolve around the privacy goal of plausible deniability. However, future research could investigate incorporating anonymity networks, such as Tor, inside IPFS to enable provider anonymity.