Content Censorship in the InterPlanetary File System
Srivatsan Sridhar, Onur Ascigil, Navin Keizer, Fran\c{c}ois Genon,, S\'ebastien Pierre, Yiannis Psaras, Etienne Rivi\`ere, Micha{\l} Kr\'ol

TL;DR
This paper identifies a simple, low-cost censorship attack on IPFS exploiting its DHT component, and proposes detection and mitigation methods that are highly effective and ready for future deployment.
Contribution
It reveals a vulnerability in IPFS's DHT that enables censorship attacks and provides practical detection and mitigation strategies with high accuracy.
Findings
Achieved 99.6% detection rate of censorship attacks
Mitigated 100% of detected attacks with minimal overhead
Vulnerability is scheduled for future IPFS updates
Abstract
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is currently the largest decentralized storage solution in operation, with thousands of active participants and millions of daily content transfers. IPFS is used as remote data storage for numerous blockchain-based smart contracts, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), and decentralized applications. We present a content censorship attack that can be executed with minimal effort and cost, and that prevents the retrieval of any chosen content in the IPFS network. The attack exploits a conceptual issue in a core component of IPFS, the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which is used to resolve content IDs to peer addresses. We provide efficient detection and mitigation mechanisms for this vulnerability. Our mechanisms achieve a 99.6\% detection rate and mitigate 100\% of the detected attacks with minimal signaling and computational overhead. We followed…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPeer-to-Peer Network Technologies · Caching and Content Delivery · Advanced Data Storage Technologies
