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On Empowering End Users in Future Networking

Published: 09 December 2024 Publication History

Abstract

In today's Internet, end users communicate largely via cloud-based apps, and user data are stored in cloud servers and controlled by cloud providers. Recent years have witnessed multiple efforts in developing decentralized social apps with various design approaches, although the community at large is yet to fully understand the effectiveness, viability, and limitations of these different designs. In this paper, we make a proposition that a necessary condition of moving towards Internet decentralization is enabling direct user-to-user (U2U) communications, and discuss the design choices in several decentralization efforts and identify their limitations. We then articulate why a DNS-derived namespace is the best choice in U2U app developments in general, and use a recently developed decentralized app, NDN Workspace (NWS), as an example to show how NWS' use of DNS-derived namespace enables secure U2U communications.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      DIN '24: Proceedings of the ACM Conext-2024 Workshop on the Decentralization of the Internet
      December 2024
      41 pages
      ISBN:9798400712524
      DOI:10.1145/3694809
      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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      Published: 09 December 2024

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      1. application
      2. decentralization
      3. security

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