Secure Data Access, Sharing and Collaboration Using Blockchain and IPFS Technology

Most data access and file-sharing systems use centralized solutions where the users of such systems have to put their trust in a third party. Such systems provide less transparency and traceability while a centralized entity mostly controls the decision making. As a solution, we propose a blockchain-based open-source, decentralized system where the decision making is done by consensus of the entire network while providing more transparency and traceability to the system's users. However, while dealing with large amounts of data stored in Blockchain, we have to consider the overhead of storing large files. Thus, we design a system where the encrypted data is stored off-chain in IPFS (Interplanetary File System), and the location of data (IPFS Content ID) is stored in Blockchain. The file access, update and management of a project is done decentrally in a secure environment, and the decision making is reached by consensus of the network entities.