Towards Secure User-Centric Networking: Service-Oriented and Decentralized Social Networks

Mobile devices like laptops or smart phones are getting more and more powerful, but still these devices are mainly used to access services, which are provided by centralized servers in the Internet. We argue that the full potential of such mobile devices could be unfold if these devices would provide services like instant messaging or file transfer themselves in a peer-to-peer manner. In this paper, we introduce SODESSON, a middleware which enables easy and secure access to services that get provided by devices belonging to the user himself and his friends or colleagues. This novel communication paradigm of user-centric networking leads to more efficient and secure communication, since the indirection introduced by servers is eliminated. Given that we focus on user-centric communication, we are able to exploit the trust relationships and communication pattern of a social graph to reach these goals.