Preserving Privacy in a P2P Social Network

Building centralized social networking systems has many drawbacks, e.g., lack of privacy, lack of anonymity, risks of censorship, and operating costs. As it is discussed in this article, an alternative approach is possible. A prototype system, named Blogracy, has been realized as a micro-blogging social networking system, based on wellknown P2P technologies, such as DHTs and BitTorrent. In particular, this article presents the security architecture of the system, which relies on a key-based identity system and a scheme for attribute-based content encryption, with multiple authorities. Moreover, some empirical results obtained in test operations over PlanetLab are presented, comparing plain and I2P anonymized communications