Open systems are those in which users anywhere on the Internet can participate and contribute. Open systems are popular today: peer-to-peer systems allow any node to join, thereby aggregating the computing resources of thousands or millions nodes to construct high capacity services cheaply. Similarly, Web 2.0 sites have democratized web publishing by inviting users anywhere on the Internet to contribute content.

Although open-ness democratizes content publishing and allows the utilization of idle desktop resources, it also hinders system reliability because many participants are selfish, unreliable, or even malicious. The goal of this research is to exploit the underlying trust relationships among users to build open systems with better security and reliability guarantees.

Current Projects

To demonstrate the power of constructing open systems on top of trust networks, we are working on the following case study systems to explore the various advantages of such an approach:

SumUp, a Sybil-resilient online content voting system.

Kaleidoscope, a decentralized system to advertise and find proxy relays. It can be used for to circumvent Internet censorsh1p.

Friendstore, a cooperative backup system where a node stores backup on other trusted nodes.

People

Nguyen Tran
Yair Sovran
Bonan Min

Jinyang Li
Lakshmi Subramanian

Publications

Sybil-resilient online content voting [PDF]
Nguyen Tran, Bonan Min, Jinyang Li, Lakshmi Submaranian
Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI'09), Apr, 2009

Friendstore: cooperative online backup using trusted nodes [PDF]
Dinh Nguyen Tran, Frank Chiang, Jinyang Li
First International Workshop on Social network systems, April 2008

Pass it on: Social networks stymie censors [PDF]
Yair Sovran, Alana Libonati, Jinyang Li
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '08), Feb 2008

Funding

This project is supported in part by NSF CAREER award 0747052