Covert Communication on IPFS using Secured Filecoin-Slate Blockchain

Abstract

Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a widely used distributed file system on a peer to peer network to store, share data and handle content management. There is often lack of availability, security and concealment on IPFS, resulting in compromise of confidential information during covert communication. The data in IPFS could be dropped and nodes compressed which results in unavailability of data. IPFS does not encrypt files and users who uploaded the sensitive data can be traced. To overcome these issues a Filecoin-Slate Blockchain (FSB) is adopted in this work. FSB is built on top of content addresser IPFS, a persistent storage ensuring data availability and transaction cost free for users who are uploading data into the FSB. This work proposes a robust and efficient implementation of FSB integrating plain text cryptography and Least Significant Bit (LSB) image steganography. Cryptography along with steganography ensures a strong two-tiered data protection, and adapting FSB guarantees file availability and integrity using inverse embedding technique. The proposed work is tested with nine high quality images and the results validate to maintain confidentiality, availability and integrity of data, for covert communication over FSB.