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 end-hosts. 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.