Title:

Design and Implementation of a Secure and Reliable P2P-based Directory Service for Profile Lookup in the SONIC Online Social Network Federation

Description:

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are mostly closed systems without any interoperability with their competitors. This thesis is part of the SONIC federation to develop an open, decentralized secure OSN ecosystem which is based on P2P topology. The central point is to extend and improve the P2P directory service, the Global Social Lookup System (GSLS). The GSLS is detached from any social platform and provides a distributed hash table (DHT) to store global user identifiers which links to the corresponding social profiles within all participating OSNs. Users of an opendecentralized OSN can seamless interconnect with all users from any other OSN. In this context important aspects are the security issues which a DHT has to deal with. Further, this thesis investigates cryptographic systems and how to secure data and its integrity via TLS. The reuslts are integrated into a new enhanced GSLS prototype.

Supervisor: Sebastian Göndör

Type:  Master Thesis

Duration:  6 months