The InterPlanetary File System: A Technical Survey of Architecture, Performance, Security, and Applications

Azizgul Azizhussaini

Abstract: The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) emerges as the most researched decentralized storage protocol within the academic literature landscape. It offers a transition from location-based addressing to content-based networking. This survey compiles peer-reviewed works from venues such as ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE INFOCOM, USENIX Security, and NDSS, covering the protocol?s design, experimental performances, security issues, and application potential. Ultimately, we find that IPFS is performance feasible for most applications (99% of DHT lookups complete in under 1.7s, it operates in 27 countries and across 2700+ autonomous systems), but security breaches abound (for example, Sybil attacks on the Kademlia DHT can eclipse content in an estimate of $4 in cloud computing (CVE-2023-26248)). Such risks align with a tension between decentralization and centralization as 95% of the content is served by the top-50 peers. This survey aids researchers and practitioners in navigating the IPFS state-of-the-art and highlights gaps for open challenges in the arenas of DHT PUT response times and Bitswap privacy threats; thus, future work relating to decentralized web infrastructure is derived.

Keywords: InterPlanetary File System, IPFS, Distributed Hash Table, Kademlia, Content-Addressable Storage, Peer-to-Peer Networks, Decentralized Web, libp2p, Bitswap

How to Cite?: Azizgul Azizhussaini, "The InterPlanetary File System: A Technical Survey of Architecture, Performance, Security, and Applications", Volume 14 Issue 12, December 2025, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1134-1140, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR251215130433, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR251215130433