Access Control and Anonymous File Sharing Using IPFS and Blockchain

This paper proposes a distributed system that aims to deliver access control, data protection, and anonymity to the users on an Interplanetary File System (IPFS) which is a protocol, hypermedia, and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. The IPFS lacks data protection features, and access control on the data provided by the users, which this system proposes to deliver, as we believe the fusion of IPFS with blockchain can enhance the efficiency of tackling the issues in the area of security, centralization and encryption keys stored with CSPs (cloud service providers), which is a major concern faced by other systems, including IPFS. The use case of our proposed system in the field of journalism can be proven to be vital.