Improving Bitswap Privacy with Forwarding and Source Obfuscation

07/07/2023

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by   Erik Daniel, et al.

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IPFS is a content-addressed decentralized peer-to-peer data network, using the Bitswap protocol for exchanging data. The data exchange leaks the information to all neighbors, compromising a user's privacy. This paper investigates the suitability of forwarding with source obfuscation techniques for improving the privacy of the Bitswap protocol. The usage of forwarding can add plausible deniability and the source obfuscation provides additional protection against passive observers. First results showed that through trickle-spreading the source prediction could decrease to 40 an increased content fetching time. However, assuming short distances between content provider and consumer the content fetching time can be faster even with the additional source obfuscation.