Towards Social Profile Based Overlays

Online social networking has quickly become one of the most common activities of Internet users. As social networks evolve, they encourage users to share more information, requiring the users, in turn, to place more trust into social networks. Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays provide an environment that can return ownership of information, trust, and control to the users, away from centralized third-party social networks. In this paper, we present a novel concept, social profile overlays, which enable users to share their profile only with trusted peers in a scalable, reliable, and private manner. Each user's profile consists of a unique private, secure overlay, where members of that overlay have a friendship with the overlay owner. Profile data is made available without regard to the online state of the profile owner through the use of the profile overlay's distributed data store. Privacy and security are enforced through the use of a public key infrastructure (PKI), where the role of certificate authority (CA) is handled by the overlay owner and each member of the overlay has a CA-signed certificate. All members of the social network join a common public or directory overlay facilitating friend discovery and bootstrap connections into profile overlays. We define interfaces and present tools that can be used to implement this system, as well as explore some of the challenges related to it.