Homeviews: peer-to-peer middleware for personal data sharing applications

ABSTRACT

This paper presents HomeViews, a peer-to-peer middleware system for building personal data management applications. HomeViews provides abstractions and services for data organization and distributed data sharing. The key innovation in HomeViews is the integration of three concepts: views and queries from databases, a capability-based protection model from operating systems, and a peer-to-peer distributed architecture. Using HomeViews, applications can (1)create views to organize files into dynamic collections, (2) share these views in a protected way across the Internet through simple exchange of capabilities, and (3) transparently integrate remote views and data into a user's local organizational structures. HomeViews operates in a purely peer-to-peer fashion, without the need for account administration or centralized data and protection management inherent in typical data-sharing systems.

We have prototyped HomeViews, deployed it on a small network of Linux machines, and used it to develop two distributed data-sharing applications: a peer-to-peer version of the Gallery photo-sharing application and a simple read-only shared file system. Using measurements, we demonstrate the practicality and performance of our approach.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.3 File Systems Management

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection

  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Distributed databases; Query processing
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Design, Management, Security

Keywords:
access control, capabilities, peer-to-peer, personal information management, search