Practical security in p2p-based social networks

The peer-to-peer paradigm is used in more and more advanced applications. One of the next areas that promise a success for the P2P paradigm lies in the upcoming trend of social networks. However, several security issues have to be solved in P2P-based social network platforms. We present in this paper a practical solution that establishes a trust infrastructure, enables authenticated and secure communication between users in the social network and provides personalized, fine grained data access control. We implemented our solution in a P2P based platform for social networks and show that the solution is practical and lightweight both in time consumption and traffic overhead.