Magic mantle using social VPNs against centralized social networking services

As centralized social networking services (SNSs) or online social networks (OSNs) have inherent privacy concerns, researchers are working on decentralized SNSs as alternatives for addressing these problems. However, it is very difficult to decentralize all the functions of centralized SNSs. This paper describes a decentralized SNS using social virtual private networks (VPNs) that work together with centralized SNSs. In this decentralized SNS, members can share private information with friends through the social VPNs while hiding the information from centralized SNSs. SNS members run applications and servers on their PCs, allow friends to access the contents of these servers, and have complete control of their own data. Community leader members called hub users run VPN servers and maintain group member lists. Other regular members manipulate the VPN clients easily using Web browsers. The proposed decentralized SNS federates the user authentication of the VPN servers with that of centralized SNSs. Furthermore, the SNS provides a zero sign-on feature for social Web applications running on a closed VPN. For realizing such a social VPN, the authors have extended SoftEther VPN, their fast, open-source VPN software. Experimental results show that applications including file sharing, a text chat, a Wiki program, an interactive game, and Usenet-like messaging performed well using the social VPN over a current fast Internet access line.

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