WARP: A ICN architecture for social data

Abstract

Social network companies maintain complete visibil- ity and ownership of the data they store. However users should be able to maintain full control over their own content. For this purpose, we propose WARP, an architecture based upon Information-Centric Networking (ICN) designs, which expands the scope of the ICN architecture beyond media distribution, to provide data control in social networks. The benefit of our solution lies in the lightweight nature of the protocol and in its layered design. With WARP, data distribution and access policies are enforced on the user side. Data can still be replicated in an ICN fashion but we introduce control channels, named thread updates, which ensures that the access to the data is always updated to the latest control policy. WARP decentralizes the social network but still offers APIs so that social network providers can build products and business models on top of WARP. Social applications run directly on the user's device and store their data on the user's butler that takes care of encryption and distribution. Moreover, users can still rely on third parties to have high- availability without renouncing their privacy. I. INTRODUCTION Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. have become irreplaceable to form virtual communities. The data shared over an OSN can be very personal and demand immediacy from the provider. As a consequence, OSNs gather huge amount of data about their users, and are now the real custodians of people's identity. Some OSNs even allow third party's software to use this knowledge. Social data can also be used to infer people's interests in order to win their attention and deliver messages more effectively, such as advertisements. The OSN platform can also be used by governments and legal agencies to monitor the user's activities. This sharing of the users' data may happen without the explicit consent of the user. Recent research efforts (25), (23), (27), (9), as well as com- mercial initiatives (say, Tent.io), have proposed to decentralize the social network so that users can maintain control over their data. Concurrently, the research community has developed new ideas for an Internet architecture that can better serve the needs of users and developers. In particular, Information Centric Networking (ICN) architectures focus on connecting users to data instead of setting up connections between machines. It is our belief that ICN architectures are now mature enough to overcome the network issues that distributed social networking has faced so far. Therefore, we propose a solution that imple- ments all the functionality common to social networks while leaving the users in full control of their data. Furthermore, our solution is compatible with the value add of current OSN providers. In this paper we present the WARP framework, that is: an architecture that allows users to share data, potentially over the infrastructure of an OSN provider, but which prevents the OSN provider to access to the user's data without the explicit consent of the user.