Trust Aware Social Networking: A Distributed Storage System based on Social Trust and Geographical Proximity

The popularity of online social network services such as Facebook and StudiVZ has been steadily increasing over the last years. User numbers of Facebook are expected to soon exceed the 150 Million user threshold. Thousands of new users register an account every day and fill the data bases of network providers with new private data. Reports on security breaches and new marketing concepts for user data diminish the trust placed in these providers. In order to gain back the user’s control over private data, Sonja Buchegger et al. [21] proposed to use a community-driven P2P solution for social network services. To date only few P2P implementations have been used. None of them incorporates security measures based social trust or provides strong availability qualities. The present diploma thesis incorporates this idea and extends it by implementing it on DSL-Routers and adding a special consideration of social trust. I base trust on social relations to support secure data exchanges and storage. The scope of this thesis includes the analysis of the system requirements, the derived software architecture and a fully working prototype that fulfills these requirements. Clique is the implementation of this architecture and is presented and evaluated as part of this work. It is shown that the software architecture is feasible to implement and deploy on a DSL-Router using the Mono runtime. I demonstrate the possibility to replace existing online social networks by implementing alternative architectures, such as Clique. Clique is a complement to current solutions and allows users to manage their private data while keeping benefits such as availability and safe storage of the information.