Related papers: Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized …
Operating a scalable and reliable server application, such as publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems, requires tremendous development efforts and resources. The emerging serverless paradigm simplifies the development and deployment of highly…
In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to…
Conventional online social networks (OSNs) are implemented in a centralized manner. Although centralization is a convenient way for implementing OSNs, it has several well known drawbacks. Chief among them are the risks they pose to the…
We propose and implement a protocol for a scalable, cost-effective, information-theoretically secure key distribution and management system. The system, called Distributed Symmetric Key Establishment (DSKE), relies on pre-shared random…
Social media users generate tremendous amounts of data. To better serve users, it is required to share the user-related data among researchers, advertisers and application developers. Publishing such data would raise more concerns on user…
Decentralization has been touted as the principal security advantage which propelled blockchain systems at the forefront of developments in the financial technology space. Its exact semantics nevertheless remain highly contested and…
With the rapid diffusion of social networks in combination with mobile phones, a new social threat of sextortion has emerged, in which vulnerable young women are essentially blackmailed with their explicit shared multimedia content. The…
The broad adoption of online social networking platforms has made it possible to study communication networks at an unprecedented scale. Digital trace data can be compiled into large data sets of online discourse. However, it is a challenge…
Online abuse is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in modern-day society, with 41 percent of Americans having experienced online harassment in some capacity in 2021. People who identify as women, in particular, can be subjected to a…
Deplatforming, or banning malicious accounts from social media, is a key tool for moderating online harms. However, the consequences of deplatforming for the wider social media ecosystem have been largely overlooked so far, due to the…
Anonymous microblogging systems are known to be vulnerable to intersection attacks due to network churn. An adversary that monitors all communications can leverage the churn to learn who is publishing what with increasing confidence over…
Differential privacy (DP) is a privacy-enhancement technology (PET) that receives prominent attention from the academia, industry, and government. One main development over the past decade has been the decentralization of DP, including…
While online interactions and exchanges have grown exponentially over the past decade, most commercial infrastructures still operate through centralized protocols, and their success essentially depends on trust between different economic…
This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and…
Group management is a fundamental building block of today's Internet applications. Mailing lists, chat systems, collaborative document edition but also online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter use group management systems. In…
At the end of October 2022, Elon Musk concluded his acquisition of Twitter. In the weeks and months before that, several questions were publicly discussed that were not only of interest to the platform's future buyers, but also of high…
Blockchain, also coined as decentralized AI, has the potential to empower AI to be more trustworthy by creating a decentralized trust of privacy, security, and audibility. However, systematic studies on the design principle of blockchain as…
To mitigate the restrictive centralising and monopolistic tendencies of platformisation, we aim to empower local communities by democratising platforms for self-organised social coordination. Our approach is to develop an open-source,…
Since its inception as a solution for secure cryptocurrencies sharing in 2008, the blockchain technology has now become one of the core technologies for secure data sharing and storage over trustless and decentralised peer-to-peer systems.…
Federated and decentralized networks supporting frequently changing system participants are a requirement for future Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. IoT devices and networks often lack adequate authentication and authorization…