Blockchain for Decentralized Services: On Improving Security and Performance of Distributed IPFS-based Web Applications

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.