Secure and Lightweight Access Control for Highly Decentralized and Distributed File Systems

The overall data traffic on the Internet has been rapidly growing, leading to a significantly increased cost of storing the exploding data. Decentralized and distributed file systems such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and BitTorrent have been increasingly widely used for storing and sharing various and massive data at a much lower cost. However, providing reliable access control to highly decentralized and distributed file systems for IoT networks is a challenging problem due to resource constraints, management overhead, and heterogeneity. To address this problem, we propose secure and lightweight access control for highly decentralized and distributed file systems. We design and implement a prototype of the proposed approach by extending an open-source software platform for access control in IoT called Secure Swarm Toolkit (SST) and using IPFS with an additional file system management mechanism. Our evaluation of the proposed approach with embedded IoT devices shows promising results by providing access control for decentralized and distributed file systems at minimal computation and communication costs. We expect our proposed approach to be applied to secure decentralized data storage with much lower costs compared to existing access control algorithms for decentralized file systems primarily based on blockchain technologies.