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working on a distributed social networking protocol (DSNP)

From: Adrian Thurston <thurston@complang.org>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:19:42 -0400
Message-ID: <4A711F5E.2080403@complang.org>
To: public-xg-socialweb@w3.org
Hi Social Web Enthusiasts,

I've been working on a distributed social networking protocol (DSNP) 
with the goal of enabling silo-free social networks. I have an 
open-source test implementation and I'm looking for people who are 
interested in helping out with developing it. My focus is on the 
protocol and daemon. I especially need help with web programming and 
user-experience.

While working on DSNP I discovered early on that security is a 
fundamental requirement. It's easy to publish information to the entire 
Internet. It's harder (but not impossible) to publish information to a 
subset of Internet users (your friends and family), grant them the most 
convenient access possible, and then deny it to the rest.

I believe I now have the security model right and it's time to start 
building real distributed social networks with this system. Here are 
some properties of the system as it stands.

-URI-based identities
-Distributed at the level of identities (as opposed to collections of)
-Single sign on
-Secure against forgery by non-friends or friends
-Secure against eavesdropping by non-friends
-Allows friendship claims to be verified by third parties
-Allows unfriending
-Security does not rely on DNS alone - if ownership of a domain is lost 
to an attacker, the attacker does not gain control of the identities there.

More info here:

http://www.complang.org/dsnp/

Thanks for your attention,
  Adrian
Received on Thursday, 30 July 2009 07:04:07 GMT

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