Return the Data to the Owner: A Browser-Based Peer-to-Peer Network

The paper covers the concept of a browser-based peerto- peer network, which supports a decentralized, redundant and encrypted data storage. The core is a JavaScript-based socket API, which facilitates creating and accepting arbitrary TCP/IP connections from within a browser. This API builds upon a WebSocket SOCKS5 Proxy. This is essential, because the sandbox of a browser does not allow plain socket connections. We used this Socket API to implement, to the best of our knowledge, the first Browser-based peer-to-peer network based on the Chord protocol. Additionally, we implemented the first JavaScript-based forward error correction based on Reed-Solomon coding to handle the recovery of lost data. Our network circumvents user-generated content stored on powerful central servers operated by huge companies which allows the creation of user profiles, the placement of customized advertisements and a possible interface for intelligence agencies to access the central stored data. Our results show, that our approach works with reasonable performance for files up to 100 KB.