B-Box - A Decentralized Storage System Using IPFS, Attributed-based Encryption, and Blockchain

Abstract

In recent years, centralized storage systems have been extensively adopted by many companies, organizations, and individuals for storing and sharing data. These systems, however, make concerns for users of a single point of failure and the involvement of a centralized entity or third party. Therefore, there is a need for developing decentralized storage systems to overcome the drawbacks of traditional approach. In order to enhance secure and transparent characteristics of decentralized storage systems, in this paper, we present a combination of IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), ABE (Attribute-based Encryption), Multi-Authority ABE (MA-ABE), and Ethereum blockchain. In particular, we facilitate the advantages of IPFS network to store user’s data in a distributed manner. Furthermore, we make the use of MA-ABE to encrypt a document, which an user needs to share it among multiple organizations. The hash returned by the IPFS network will be stored in the Ethereum blockchain network to provide trustworthy for all users participating in our system. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first storage system using IPFS, ABE, MA-ABE, and blockchain technologies together to ensure decentralized, secure, and transparent characteristics for storing and sharing data.