On the Efficiency of Decentralized File Storage for Personal Information Management Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores a decentralized architecture combining Distributed Ledger Technologies and File Storage systems to enhance personal data management, ensuring data integrity, compliance, and feasibility through experimental evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture integrating DLTs and DFS for personal data management, demonstrating its feasibility with experimental results across different scenarios.

Findings

Decentralized PDS is feasible with proper system configuration.

DLTs provide immutable references and tamper-proof logs for personal data.

Experimental evaluation confirms viability across multiple DFS scenarios.

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture, based on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and Decentralized File Storage (DFS) systems, to support the use of Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS). DLT and DFS are used to manage data sensed by mobile users equipped with devices with sensing capability. DLTs guarantee the immutability, traceability and verifiability of references to personal data, that are stored in DFS. In fact, the inclusion of data digests in the DLT makes it possible to obtain an unalterable reference and a tamper-proof log, while remaining compliant with the regulations on personal data, i.e. GDPR. We provide an experimental evaluation on the feasibility of the use of DFS. Three different scenarios have been studied: i) a proprietary IPFS approach with a dedicated node interfacing with the data producers, ii) a public IPFS service and iii) Sia Skynet. Results show that through proper configuration of the system infrastructure, it is viable to build a decentralized Personal Data Storage (PDS).