Improving Bitswap Privacy with Forwarding and Source Obfuscation

TL;DR

This paper explores how forwarding and source obfuscation techniques can enhance privacy in the Bitswap protocol of IPFS, balancing privacy gains with potential impacts on content fetching times.

Contribution

It introduces forwarding with source obfuscation as a method to improve privacy in Bitswap, demonstrating its effectiveness and impact on performance.

Findings

Source prediction decreased by 40% with trickle-spreading.

Content fetching time can be faster with obfuscation at short distances.

Forwarding with obfuscation offers plausible deniability for users.

Abstract

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 %, at the cost of 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.