Privacy-Aware Contact Sharing for Groups in P2P Networks

The need for peer-to-peer (p2p) communications is obvious because current centralized solutions are capturing and storing too much information from individuals communicating with each other. HELIOS platform introduces a new social media platform that is not controlled by any central operator but brings the power of possession of the data back to the users. It does not have centralized servers that store and handle receiving/sending of the messages. Instead, HELIOS platform relies on the current open-source solutions available in the p2p communities to propagate the messages to the wanted recipients of the data and/or messages. The authors of this paper propose a set of protocols to help answer one specific problem related to p2p communication. Especially, this paper proposes how to privately share data (end-point address or other) of the user with such other users who have previously connected with the user securely, either offline or online.