PriSM: A Private Social Mesh for Leveraging Social Networking at Workplace

TL;DR

PriSM is a decentralized social networking framework enabling organizations to securely and privately manage their social interactions at the workplace, balancing control, security, and collaborative benefits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized architecture for workplace social networks that maintains organizational autonomy and confidentiality while enabling cross-organizational interactions.

Findings

Supports secure cross-ASN interactions with confidentiality controls

Allows organizations to deploy social networks on private or public clouds

Enhances workplace communication without compromising security

Abstract

In this work we describe the PriSM framework for decentralized deployment of a federation of autonomous social networks (ASN). The individual ASNs are centrally managed by organizations according to their institutional needs, while cross-ASN interactions are facilitated subject to security and confidentiality requirements specified by administrators and users of the ASNs. Such decentralized deployment, possibly either on private or public clouds, provides control and ownership of information/flow to individual organizations. Lack of such complete control (if third party online social networking services were to be used) has so far been a great barrier in taking full advantage of the novel communication mechanisms at workplace that have however become commonplace for personal usage with the advent of Web 2.0 platforms and online social networks. PriSM provides a practical solution for organizations to harness the advantages of online social networking both in intra/inter-organizational settings without sacrificing autonomy, security and confidentiality needs.