Decentralized social networking using named-data

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) can be considered as huge success. However, this success costs users their privacy and loosing ownership of their own data; Sometimes the operators of social networking sites, have some business incentives adverse to users’ expectations of privacy. These sort of privacy breaches have inspired research toward privacy- preserving alternatives for social networking in a decentralized fashion. Yet almost all alternatives lack proper feasibility and efficiency, which is because of a huge mismatch between aforementioned goal and today’s network’s means of achieving it. Current Internet architecture is showing signs of age. Among a variety of proposed directions for a new Internet architecture is Named Data Networking (NDN), focused on retrieving content by name, which names packets rather than endhosts. NDN characteristics greatly facilitate development of applications tailored for today’s needs. In this paper a decentralized architecture for social networking is proposed that provides strong privacy guarantees while preserving the main functionalities of OSNs, in a content- based paradigm. The simulation results show that not only it is feasible to have decentralized social networking over content centric networks, but also it is significantly more efficient from a global network point of view.