Migrating Online Social Networks to Home Gateways

Details

Supervisor:	David Koll
Duration:	3-6 months
Type:	Student Project and Master Thesis, consecutively -- OR -- Master Thesis
Status:	open

Users of Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become increasingly concerned about the privacy of their data in these networks. In fact, the providers (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or Google) often analyze or sell private user data without the owners' consent. As a consequence, the research community in both academia and industry as well as teams of software engineers have tried to come up with alternatives to the centralized paradigm.

In the centralized paradigm, unencrypted data is stored in big data centers which are operated by the providers of OSNs. Breaking with this paradigm, a trend is to decentralize the data storage and to let users determine where to store their data. Currently, this mostly happens in paid data centers or in a Peer-to-Peer fashion similar to BitTorrent.

In this project and thesis, the student should design and implement a system that introduces a new solution. Instead of storing data at datacenters or computers, the idea is to have home gateways (i.e., personal routers) to take over this task. This has a couple of major advantages: First, the user can control his/her own data. Second, in contrast to datacenters, no third party can track access to the data. Third, home gateways are usually "always on" devices, which means that -- in contrast to BitTorrent-like systems -- only little or no replication is needed.