WARP: A ICN architecture for social data
This addresses data privacy and ownership issues for social media users by decentralizing control, though it is an incremental extension of ICN to social networks.
The authors tackled the problem of users lacking control over their data in social networks by proposing WARP, an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture that decentralizes data storage and enforces access policies on the user side, enabling users to maintain full control while allowing third-party replication for high-availability.
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.