A Peer-to-Peer Data Sharing Framework for Web Browsers

Abstract

Concerns over data ownership and misuse of personal data over the Web have become increasingly widespread in recent years; especially, as most web service providers are moving towards closed silo-based platforms, making the web more and more centralized. This is concerning, because, as service providers move towards centralized data storage and management, end-users become more susceptible to loss of data ownership and misuse of personal data. While in recent years, quite a few solutions have been proposed to solve these issues, the issues themselves still prevail, primarily due to lack of acceptance. That said, in this paper, we build on our previously proposed browser-based Peer-to-Peer Data Sharing Framework. We first explain the requirements and design choices which we had to keep in mind while designing the framework. And then, we provide insights into how we evaluated the functionalities and security features of the framework, through lab experiments. Finally, we elucidate the direction in which we would like to develop the framework in the near future.