Design of a Privacy-Preserving Decentralized File Storage with Financial Incentives

Abstract

Surveys indicate that users are often afraid to entrust data to cloud storage providers, because these do not offer sufficient privacy. On the other hand, peer-2-peer-based privacy-preserving storage systems like Freenet suffer from a lack of contribution and storage capacity, since there is basically no incentive to contribute own storage capacity to other participants in the network. We address these contradicting requirements by a design which combines a distributed storage with a privacy-preserving blockchain-based payment system to create incentives for participation while maintaining user privacy. By following a Privacy-by-Design strategy integrating privacy throughout the whole system life cycle, we show that it is possible to achieve levels of privacy comparable to state-of-the-art distributed storage technologies, despite integrating a payment mechanism. Our results show that it is possible to combine storage contracts and payments in a privacy-preserving way. Further, our system design may serve as an inspiration for future similar architectures.