The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is employed extensively nowadays by many blockchain projects to store personal data off-chain to comply with the Right to be Forgotten (RtbF) requirement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the new regulatory regime for personal data protection in the EU. In such a way, when a request for content erasure is to be carried out under the RtbF, the onus of removing the actual personal information moves to the IPFS protocol. Nevertheless, enforcing data erasure across the entire IPFS network is not actually feasible, mainly due to its decentralized nature. Consequently, the implementation of a delegation mechanism for handling content erasure requests within the IPFS would be the most conducive way towards aligning the IPFS with the GDPR. To that end, in this work, we propose an anonymous protocol for delegated content erasure requests in the IPFS. The proposed protocol could be smoothly integrated into the IPFS to distribute an erasure request among all the IPFS nodes and, ultimately, to fulfil the erasure requirements foreseen in the RtbF. Furthermore, the protocol complies with the primary principle of the IPFS to prevent censoring; therefore, erasure is only allowed to the original content provider or her delegates. A formal definition and the security proofs are provided, along with a set of experiments that prove the efficacy of the proposed protocol. We demonstrate that the overhead introduced by the proposed protocol does not affect the system’s efficiency. Our experimental results exhibit a robust performance as the average times for generating the content-dependent keys and for spreading the erasure requests do not affect the overall performance of the IPFS.

如今，许多区块链项目广泛使用行星际文件系统（IPFS），以在链下存储个人数据，以符合通用数据保护条例（GDPR）的被遗忘权（RtbF）要求，这是针对个人的新监管制度欧盟的数据保护。这样，当要在RtbF下执行内容擦除请求时，删除实际个人信息的责任就移到了IPFS协议上。然而，主要由于其分散的性质，在整个IPFS网络上强制执行数据擦除实际上是不可行的。因此，在IPFS中实施用于处理内容删除请求的委托机制将是使IPFS与GDPR保持一致的最有利方式。为此，在这项工作中，我们为IPFS中的委托内容擦除请求提出了一个匿名协议。可以将提议的协议顺利集成到IPFS中，以在所有IPFS节点之间分配擦除请求，并最终满足RtbF中预见的擦除要求。此外，该协议符合IPFS的主要原则以防止审查。因此，仅允许原始内容提供者或其代表删除。提供了正式定义和安全性证明，以及一系列证明所提出协议的有效性的实验。我们证明了所提出的协议引入的开销不会影响系统的效率。