Friend News System: A Modern Implementation of Usenet over Social VPNs

Since centralized Social Networking Services (SNSs) inherently have privacy concerns, researchers are working on decentralized SNSs for solving them. However, it is very difficult to replace all the roles of the centralized SNSs with decentralize ones. This paper describes the Friend News System, a messaging system that works together with a centralized SNS while maintaining a necessary level of privacy. This system is an implementation of Usenet using existing centralized SNSs for small groups. It inherits the decentralized architecture, robustness, and rich news readers from Usenet. It allows users to exchange messages without needing centralized servers. In addition, it provides new private communication capabilities for small groups. First, it can limit the message delivery to closed groups. Second, it allows message classification by using tags. Finally, it prevents spoofing by using digital signature. In the Friend News System, a node exchanges messages based on a Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)-like protocol over a social Virtual Private Network (VPN). A social VPN performs user authentication by using SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter, and provides private communication among friends´ PCs. To realize a social VPN, the authors have extended Soft Ether VPN, which is their fast and easy-to-use open-source VPN software. The Friend News System performed well on the current Internet access lines.