The Story of ChronoShare, or How NDN Brought Distributed Secure File Sharing Back

Abstract

Information sharing among a group of friends or colleagues in real life is usually a distributed process: we tell each other interesting or important news without any mandatory assistance or approval from a third party. Surprisingly, this is not what happens when sharing files among a group of friends over the Internet. While the goal of file sharing is to disseminate files among multiple parties, due to the constraints imposed by IP's point-to-point communication model, most of today's file sharing applications, such as Drop box, Google Drive, etc., resort to a centralized design paradigm: a user first uploads files to the server (cloud), and the server (cloud) re-distributes these files to other users, resulting in unnecessary tussles and inefficient data distribution paths. To bring the truly distributed file sharing back into the cyberspace, this paper presents Chrono Share, a distributed file sharing application built on top of the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture. By walking through Chrono Share design details, we show how file sharing, as well as many other similar applications, can be effectively implemented over NDN in a truly distributed and secure manner.