Protected chords in the web: secure P2P framework for decentralized online social networks

Online social networks have emerged as a main tool to communicate in the Internet. While centralized solutions are prone to censorship, privacy violations and unwanted marketing of the users data, decentralized solutions, e.g. based on p2p technology, promise to overcome these limitations. One major shortcoming is the need to install additional software, which is progressively not accepted by users which are used to web-based applications. In this paper, we present how WebRTC can be used to implement an installation-free, fully decentralized online social network. With WebRTC, standard browsers can communicate directly, which allows to construct PKI secured p2p overlays with replicated and access-controlled, reliable storage. Evaluation shows that our approach is scalable in terms of the number of users and complies with performance requirements stated to today´s social networks.