Peervasives: a Secure Social Peer-to-Peer Network

1  Introduction

Social networks web-sites, such as Facebook, have become very popular, some of them including millions of users. In such a network, each user creates links to its acquintances, so that he can share informations with them. Such networks have also raised a lot of concern, because they often collect private informations on their users and can use the links between users for commercial purposes.

Recently, some peer-to-peer networks, such as GNUnet or Turtle, have been designed using the same idea: users are only connected to their acquaintances. Such networks provide a much better level of privacy: private information is stored on the user computer, and only his friends can get access to it, using encrypted communications.

In the Peervasives project, we forcast that these networks will gradually replace both current peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and social networks web-sites, in a trend towards the protection of user privacy on the Internet.

Such social peer-to-peer networks exhibit particular constraints that prevent from using most standard protocols designed for other peer-to-peer networks. Among these constraints, the most important ones are:

• Reduced Connectivity: peers cannot communicate with all the other peers in the network. For two peers to communicate, the two corresponding users must have agreed to allow connections between their clients, usually using some exchange of cryptographic keys.
• Global Anonimity: peers have global identities in the network (usually based on their cryptographic public keys), but these identities are only known by their acquaintances, and are never propagated to other peers in the network.

We plan to investigate efficient mechanisms to localize and download ressources in such a network.

References

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.