Enhancing P2P applications (file sharing & streaming) with social incentives

Participants:

Reza S.
Jiayi
Faranz
Nicolae
Reza F.
Nitin

Guiding Questions

Advantages of P2P
- Functionality (configurable control)
- Scalability
- Less servers
- Lower bandwidth requirements for the hardware
- difficult to monitor
- less centralized servers
What is the value of P2P?
- A P2P system is a decentralized network and we want to use social networks on top of it, in contrast to introduce a decentralized social network
- Adding social intencives inversly affects the privacy(one solution: OneSwarm)
- There is a trade-off between privacy and improved service
- We can use a social network trust to start file sharing from 1st hop, then move to next hop
What P2P applications can be improved if the design takes social relations into account?
- content sharing and management
- bitcoins (cpu time)
- P2P google like searching
- using friends for helping with the upload in P2P
- Distcc compiler (?)
- improving video streaming using the friendships (friends watch the same tv channel online)
What are the currently existing efforts in this direction?
- Freenet
  - Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect. Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are routed through other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.
  - Anonymizing overlays such as Tor and Freenet can improve user privacy, but only at a cost of substantially reduced performance.
- One swarm
  - OneSwarm, that provides users much better privacy than BitTorrent and much better performance than Tor or Freenet. A key aspect of the OneSwarm design is that users have explicit configurable control over the amount of trust they place in peers and in the sharing model for their data: the same data can be shared publicly, anonymously, or with access control, with both trusted and untrusted peers.
Social network applications using peer to peer technology:
- Safebook
  - Safebook is an innovative privacy preserving on-line social network.
    Unlike well known services like Facebook, Xing, Orkut, LinkedIn and the like, Safebook is based on a peer-to-peer architecture, thus avoiding central omniscient entities to store every member's data.
- Developed SNP2P prototypes: Tribler, PeerSON, SocioNet, ...
What are the challenges in designing socially-aware P2P applications and what are we still missing?
- bootstrapping problem in P2P networks, use a social network to decide where to start, find the nodes and even find trusted nodes
- what security aspects must be considered (including privacy issues)
  - Sybil attacks(using the fast mixing properties of social networks)
  - Access control
- compromized nodes
- non-human aspect of social networks
- Topology: Should nodes be connected according to their social connection? "friendship" and "trust", Trust and Integrity
- "Updates: How can we deal with updates, e.g. status updates of friends? Find solution for Update propagation and versioning"
- "Storages: Where should content be stored? Find solution for distributed storage of data"
  - Only at friends?
  - Encrypted and at random nodes?
  - In a DHT?
  - As in file-sharing
- Designing trust models

Applications:

content sharing and management
BitCoins
Google Search engine in P2P manner
DistCC compiler
P2P video streaming
P2P alarm clock service (http://goo.gl/FYgmI) --> think of adding social networks in, imagine the pleasure of waking your friends up at like 4 AM

Summary of breakout session discussion

Please summarize the points from the break out sessions here.

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AUWhymYm_PSMZGNxcGRmN2pfOTJkMmZiM3Rjdw&hl=en_GB