INGI Seminar - InterPlanetary File System Under Pressure: Navigating Centralisation and Content Moderation Challenges

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is one of the largest content storage systems in the decentralised web. However, despite its promise, the IPFS network increasingly exhibits centralised tendencies.

 

In this talk, I will present findings from a comprehensive, large-scale analysis of the IPFS ecosystem [1], highlighting significant centralisation pressures driven by major stakeholders and cloud-hosted nodes. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the challenge of content moderation in IPFS [2]. As IPFS attracts more users and content, including problematic content, moderation becomes a complex issue.

 

I will explain how we identify, characterise, and measure the presence of problematic content (e.g., phishing, CSAM, etc.) in IPFS that are subject to takedown notices. I will then discuss our analysis of the complete content moderation process, including how problematic content is flagged and who hosts and retrieves them. This talk will synthesise insights from two recent studies [1,2], discussing the pressures of centralisation and the ongoing struggle to moderate content within IPFS effectively.

 

[1] Leonhard Balduf, Maciej Korczyński, Onur Ascigil, Navin V Keizer, George Pavlou, Björn Scheuermann, and Michał Król, The Cloud Strikes Back: Investigating the Decentralisation of IPFS, ACM IMC 2023

[2] Saidu Sokoto, Leonhard Balduf, Dennis Trautwein, Yiluo Wei, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, Onur Ascigil, George Pavlou, Maciej Korczynski, Björn Scheuermann, and Michał Król, Guardians of the Galaxy: Content Moderation in the InterPlanetary File System, USENIX Security 2024