Towards model-based development of decentralised peer-to-peer data vaults

Abstract

Using centralised data storage systems has been the standard practice followed by online service providers when managing the personal data of their users. This method requires users to trust these providers and, to some extent, users are not in full control over their data. The development of applications around decentralised data vaults, i.e., encrypted storage systems located in user-managed devices, can give this control back to the users as sole owners of the data. However, the development of such applications is not effortfree, and it requires developers to have specialised knowledge, such as how to deploy secure and peer-to-peer communication systems. We present Vaultage, a model-based framework that can simplify the development of data vault applications. We demonstrate its core features through a social network application case study and include some initial evaluation results, showing Vaultage's code generation capabilities and some profiling analysis of the generated network components. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Development frameworks and environments; Automatic programming; • Security and privacy → Software security engineering.

Vaultage: Automatic Generation of Secure Communication around Decentralised User-Managed Data Vaults.

“…This work is an extension of our previous workshop paper (Yohannis et al 2020). Some of the new features we added are the direct communication mode between vaults, which allows a vault to send a message directly to another vault without the relay of a central broker, and the support for transferring data in other types (e.g., media files).…”

“…The core architecture of Vaultage was introduced in a previous workshop paper (Yohannis et al 2020). As an extension of that paper, this work includes:…”