Musubi

Abstract

This paper presents Musubi, a mobile social application platform that enables users to share any data type in realtime feeds created by any application on the phone. Musubi is unique in providing a disintermediated service to end users; all communication is supported using public key encryption thus leaking no user information to a third party.Despite the heavy use of cryptography to provide user authentication and access control, users found Musubi simple to use. We embed key exchange within familiar friending actions, and allow users to interact with any friend in their address books without requiring them to join a common network a priori. Our feed abstraction allows users to easily exercise access control. All data reside on the phone, granting users the freedom to apply applications of their choice.In addition to disintermediating personal messaging, we have created an application platform to support multi-party software with the same respect for personal data. The So-cialKit library we created on top of Musubi's trusted communication protocol facilitates the development of multiparty applications and integrates with Musubi to provide a compelling group application experience. SocialKit allows developers to make social, interactive, privacy-honoring applications without needing to host their own servers.

A Peer-to-Peer Data Sharing Framework for Web Browsers

“…As mentioned in "Introduction", in recent years, numerous scientific artifacts have been proposed to tackle data ownership and privacy issues. Among said artifacts, our work has been primarily influenced by platforms including Musubi [4], CIMBA [20], Solid [14,21], and Dokieli [3]. Each of these platforms was designed to allow users to create and share data via secure networks.…”

“…The Musubi [4] platform was proposed by Dodson et al in 2012 and is designed as a mobile social application platform that allows users to share real-time feeds over mobile devices. The platform allows users to interact with their friends directly through their address books, while ensuring data security and privacy with the help of end-to-end public-key encryption.…”

“…Unfortunately, since the platform is primarily designed for mobile devices, it does not support direct P2P connections, as it is not possible to establish a true P2P network over a 3G network. Musubi, therefore, relies on a centralized service Trusted Group Communication Protocol [4].…”

“…Such incidents have prompted serious concerns, about data ownership, misuse of user data, and lack of secure interoperability between platforms owned by different organizations. And while several remarkable contributions [3,4,[19][20][21] have been made to tackle these challenges, most of the said contributions are still underutilized.…”

THINPLE - the new online Sociality is built on top of NFC-based Contacts

“…Smartphones equipped with NFC device allow us to overcome this limitation. Up to now NFC has been exploited to exchange personal information or content sharing between people [13], and between people and object, as for payments. To the best of our knowledge this is the first social network based on real encounters, and including both people and object.…”