Secure Data Management in P2P Social Networks Using Access Tokens

Current Online Social Networks (OSNs) use a centralized architecture that aggregates the user's data at the provider's servers. Such setup makes the provider actually own user's data, which could represent a privacy violation for the users. Peer-to-peer Online Social Networks (P2P OSNs) could be an alternative to such centralized paradigm. Nevertheless, P2P OSNs still have its own technical challenges such as data access management. In this paper, a model for secure data access management in P2P OSNs is proposed. This model focuses on reducing the cost of access revocation in terms of network and computational resources compared to other P2P OSNs models. Moreover, it supports all the basic features of modern OSNs. Analysis and simulation show the superiority of this model in access revocation cost compared to other P2P OSNs models, and a comparable performance for other functions.