Framework for Peer-to-Peer Data Sharing over Web Browsers

Abstract

The Web was originally designed to be a decentralized environment where everybody could share a common information space to communicate and share information. However, over the last decade, the Web has become increasingly centralized. This has led to serious concerns about data ownership and misuse of personal data. While there are several approaches to solve these problems, none of them provides a simple and extendable solution. To this end, in this paper, we present an application-independent, browser-based framework for sharing data between applications over peer-to-peer networks. The framework aims to empower end-users with complete data ownership, by allowing them to store shareable web content locally, and by enabling content sharing without the risk of data theft or monitoring. We present the functional requirements, implementation details, security aspects, and limitations of the proposed framework. And finally, discuss the challenges that we encountered while designing the framework; especially, why it is difficult to create a server-less application for the Web.