Towards Decentralised Cloud Storage with IPFS: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent data ownership initiatives such as GAIA-X attempt to shift from currently common centralised cloud storage solutions to decentralised alternatives, which gives users more control over their data. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a storage architecture which attempts to provide decentralised cloud storage by building on founding principles of P2P networking and content addressing. It combines approaches from previous research, such as Kademlia-based Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), git's versioning model with cryptographic hashing, Merkle Trees, and content-based addressing in order to compose a protocol stack that supports both forward and backward compatibility of components. IPFS is used by more than 250k peers per month and serves tens of millions of requests per day, which makes it an interesting large-scale operational network to study. In this editorial, we provide an overview of the IPFS design and its core features, along with the opportunities that it opens as well as the challenges that it faces because of its properties. IPFS provides persistence of names, censorship circumvention, built-in file deduplication with integrity verification, and file delivery to external users via an HTTP gateway, among other properties.