Designing a Secure Device-to-Device File Transfer Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure, reliable, and open device-to-device file transfer protocol inspired by WebRTC, utilizing relay servers to improve efficiency and privacy, and compares its performance with existing solutions.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel device-to-device file transfer protocol using relay servers, enhancing security, reliability, and performance over traditional server-based methods.

Findings

The proposed protocol outperforms WebRTC in transfer speed.

Relay server approach reduces storage and bandwidth costs.

Empirical benchmarks show improved efficiency and security.

Abstract

Secure, reliable, and fast transfer of files across the Internet is a problem attempted to be solved through many application-layer protocols. In this paper, we aim to design a secure, reliable, opendesign, and performant file transfer protocol that is inspired by the WebRTC protocol stack. Traditionally, transferring files involves a publicly exposed (available on the public network) third-party server that serves the uploaded files to the receiver. Here, the third party server has to bear the storage and bandwidth cost to transfer the files between the two parties. We propose a protocol that uses a relay server to relay the files from the client to the server. A relay server has several advantages over a regular file-hosting server. Firstly, a relay server does not retain the uploaded files, it simply relays them. Secondly, a relay server has a full-duplex communication channel and therefore the receiver is not required to wait for the sender to upload the files completely. In this paper, we study available file transfer approaches and their known flaws. We propose our idea and compare our stack with the WebRTC stack. Finally, we perform empirical analysis and, benchmark our device-to-device transfer approach along with other available options including WebRTC.