Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Tim Berners-Lee's call to re-decentralize the web, and the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit that followed, will challenge researchers worldwide to come up with mechanisms and architectures that bring openness and resiliency to the web.

For such a vision to become reality, end users will have to participate actively in the data- and application-sharing and hosting effort. This raises several issues, such as:
- the need to provide an incentive to users to participate in the effort,
- the need to determine trustworthy participants and to resist attacks from malicious peers,
- the need for the applications to be practical, computationally effective, and scalable.

We propose to build on our work on peer-to-peer data-sharing architectures and applications to study the above issues. In particular, we will investigate an architecture based on an overlay of a social network on top of a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, for which we will:
- evaluate data and knowledge query efficiency,
- propose incentive schemes for the participation of users,
- and study the way they will self-organize for efficiency and trust purposes.

We will validate our work with analytical methods, simulations and real-life deployment of practical and useful applications.