Custodian-based information sharing

Information sharing systems such as iCloud, Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter are ubiquitous today, but all of them depend on massive server infrastructure and always-on Internet connectivity. We have designed and implemented a sharing system that does not require infrastructure yet supports robust, distributed, secure sharing by opportunistically using any and all connectivity, local or global, permanent or transient, to communicate. One key element of this system is a new information routing model that so far has proven to be as scalable and efficient as the best of the current Internet routing protocols, while operating in an environment more complex and dynamic than they can tolerate. The new routing model is made possible by new affordances offered by information-centric networking, in particular, the open source CCN [1] release. This article describes the new system and its routing model, and provides some performance measurements.