Abstract
Online social networks (OSNs) are becoming more and more prevalent in people's life, but they face the problem of privacy leakage due to the centralized data management mechanism. The emergence of distributed OSNs (DOSNs) can solve this privacy issue, yet they bring inefficiencies in providing the main functionalities, such as access control and data availability. In this article, in view of the above-mentioned challenges encountered in OSNs and DOSNs, we exploit the emerging blockchain technique to design a new DOSN framework that integrates the advantages of both traditional centralized OSNs and DOSNs. By combining smart contracts, we use the blockchain as a trusted server to provide central control services. Meanwhile, we separate the storage services so that users have complete control over their data. In the experiment, we use real-world data sets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Highlights
O NLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS (OSNs) have become extremely popular on the Web, where users can share digital photos/videos and informal diary-style text entries (“posts”) with their friends
We propose a new blockchain-based framework to tackle the aforementioned challenges of OSNs and distributed OSNs (DOSNs)
2) We design two smart contracts to implement some functionalities provided by the central server in the traditional OSN, which are more difficult to achieve in the existing DOSNs
Summary
O NLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS (OSNs) have become extremely popular on the Web, where users can share digital photos/videos and informal diary-style text entries (“posts”) with their friends. We propose a new blockchain-based framework to tackle the aforementioned challenges of OSNs and DOSNs. The blockchain provides a unique address for each registered account, which is used as the identity for each user in this framework. One of the services is that a user can timely receive notifications (e.g., post updating) with the event mechanism provided by the smart contract, and he does not need to ask each friend periodically. Our framework integrates the advantages of OSNs with central servers and DOSNs to implement a social network where users can socialize more privately and freely. 2) We design two smart contracts to implement some functionalities provided by the central server in the traditional OSN, which are more difficult to achieve in the existing DOSNs. 3) We verify the feasibility of the proposed framework by implementing a software prototype based on Ethereum with the real-world data sets.
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