1 research outputs found
Towards Social Profile Based Overlays
Online social networking has quickly become one of the most common activities
of Internet users. As social networks evolve, they encourage users to share
more information, requiring the users, in turn, to place more trust into social
networks. Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays provide an environment that can return
ownership of information, trust, and control to the users, away from
centralized third-party social networks.
In this paper, we present a novel concept, social profile overlays, which
enable users to share their profile only with trusted peers in a scalable,
reliable, and private manner. Each user's profile consists of a unique private,
secure overlay, where members of that overlay have a friendship with the
overlay owner. Profile data is made available without regard to the online
state of the profile owner through the use of the profile overlay's distributed
data store. Privacy and security are enforced through the use of a public key
infrastructure (PKI), where the role of certificate authority (CA) is handled
by the overlay owner and each member of the overlay has a CA-signed
certificate. All members of the social network join a common public or
directory overlay facilitating friend discovery and bootstrap connections into
profile overlays. We define interfaces and present tools that can be used to
implement this system, as well as explore some of the challenges related to it