Publication Date

Spring 2023

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Chris Pollett

Second Advisor

Ben Reed

Third Advisor

Sanmesh Bhosale

Keywords

Distributed Filesystem, Blockchain, Chord, DHT, Smart Contracts

Abstract

Distributed filesystem architectures use commodity hardware to store data on a large scale with maximum consistency and availability. Blockchain makes it possible to store information that can never be tampered with and incentivizes a traditional decentralized storage system. This project aimed to implement a decentralized filesystem that leverages the blockchain to keep a record of all the transactions on it. A conventional filesystem viz. GFS [1] or HDFS [2] uses designated servers owned by their organization to store the data and are governed by a master service. This project aimed at removing a single point of failure and makes use of participating users’ machines to store data. The implemented file system uses a distributed hash table to evenly store data on multiple machines and efficiently look up, track, maintain, and persist the data. The data stored on the file system is made easily and readily accessible to a user ensuring its soundness. Finally using smart contracts enabled incentives and increased the integrity and reliability of storing data by recording all the transactions. The project functions autonomously by coordinating multiple participant machines in the network to store data and monetize unused storage space on the machines. It supports the basic functionalities of a filesystem which include storing, deletion, and reading a file as desired. The filesystem’s performance was tested with files of different sizes and a variable number of nodes. The current file system is able to store files as big as 100 MB within 12 seconds and 300 MB in less than 25 seconds. This is significantly faster than Storj [3] which nearly takes more than a minute for a similar operation. The tests also provided observations on the average gas consumed during transactions.

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