Centralized to Decentralized Social Networks

Abstract

This work covers the research work on decentralization of Online Social Networks (OSNs), issues with centralized design are studied with possible decentralized solutions. Centralized architecture is prone to privacy breach, p2p architecture for data and thus authority decentralization with encryption seems a possible solution. OSNs' users grow exponentially causing scalability issue, a natural solution is decentralization where users bring resources with them via personal machines or paid services. Also centralized services are not available unremittingly, to this end decentralization proposes replication. Decentralized solutions are also proposed for reliability issues arising in centralized systems and the potential threat of a central authority. Yet key to all problems isn't found, metadata may be enough for inferences about data and network traffic flow can lead to information on users' relationships. First issue can be mitigated by data padding or splitting in uniform blocks. Caching, dummy traffic or routing through a mix of nodes can be some possible solutions to the second.