BIO

My name is Dhruvi Shah and I am a Computer Science major. I am interested in software engineering and aspire to become a successful software engineer. Besides software engineering, I also would also love to learn about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Designing a User Friendly Interface for IPFS

Abstract

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that focuses on content-based addressing across the same system of files. Creating a Merkle DAG file structure, IPFS encompasses a block storage structure with content-addressed hyperlinks. This protocol can be seen as an improvement to the universal HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). With IPFS being such a new topic in the field, it was imperative to start off by learning about the protocol itself and accessing the IPFS Desktop. The IPFS Desktop is an application that can be downloaded onto a laptop. It allows users to upload and retrieve files to and from IPFS. In accessing the Desktop, we found that its limitation in configuration has become a challenge for its adoption. Due to the lack of tools, users are not able to customize aspects of the protocol in order to fit their needs. To handle this, we propose a user interface (UI) that will allow users to have access to the different properties of IPFS and be able to alter them to best fit their necessities.

Keywords: Computer Science, IPFS, UI, Networks