WARP: A ICN architecture for social data

TL;DR

WARP is a lightweight ICN-based architecture that empowers social network users with full control over their data, enabling decentralized, privacy-preserving social applications with policy enforcement on user devices.

Contribution

It introduces WARP, a novel ICN-inspired architecture that decentralizes social data control, enforces access policies locally, and supports privacy-preserving social applications.

Findings

WARP enables user-controlled data distribution and access policies.

The architecture supports data replication with control channels for policy updates.

WARP maintains high availability and privacy through user devices and third-party services.

Abstract

Social network companies maintain complete visibility and ownership of the data they store. However users should be able to maintain full control over their content. For this purpose, we propose WARP, an architecture based upon Information-Centric Networking (ICN) designs, which expands the scope of the ICN architecture beyond media distribution, to provide data control in social networks. The benefit of our solution lies in the lightweight nature of the protocol and in its layered design. With WARP, data distribution and access policies are enforced on the user side. Data can still be replicated in an ICN fashion but we introduce control channels, named \textit{thread updates}, which ensures that the access to the data is always updated to the latest control policy. WARP decentralizes the social network but still offers APIs so that social network providers can build products and business models on top of WARP. Social applications run directly on the user's device and store their data on the user's \textit{butler} that takes care of encryption and distribution. Moreover, users can still rely on third parties to have high-availability without renouncing their privacy.