Paper 4

Characterization of the IPFS Public Network from DHT Requests

Authors: Bastien Confais, Benoît Parrein, Jérôme Lacan, François Marques

Volume 55 (2023)

Abstract

Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a file sharing network relying on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to locate data and a BitTorrent-like protocol to exchange blocks between the peers. However, in such a network, all nodes can access information about the files stored or accessed by others. In this article, we use these public pieces of information to try to characterize the IPFS network both in terms of nodes composing it and on the files stored in it. To that end, we set up an IPFS node connected to the public IPFS network and saved all the DHT requests forwarded through it. We show that nodes are mostly located in datacenters and not on the end-users’ computers and therefore that files are often accessed through public gateways. We also show that most files are not replicated and are not accessed frequently (cold data) which can question us about the relevance of using IPFS in such use case scenarios.

Keywords

IPFS, Network monitoring, Kademlia DHT, Peer-to-Peer storage