Peer2PIR: Private Queries for IPFS

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer network for storing data in a distributed file system, hosting over 190,000 peers spanning 152 countries. Despite its prominence, the privacy properties that IPFS offers to peers are severely limited. Any query within the network leaks the queried content to other peers. We address IPFS’ privacy leakage across three functionalities (peer routing, provider advertisements, and content retrieval), ultimately empowering peers to privately navigate and retrieve content in the network. Our work highlights and addresses novel challenges inherent to integrating PIR into distributed systems. We present our new, private protocols and demonstrate that they incur reasonably low communication and computation overheads. We also provide a systematic comparison of state-of-art PIR protocols in the context of distributed systems.