Safebook is an online social network that is specifically designed to prevent privacy violations by intruders, malicious users and/or even by OSN providers. Safebook is mainly characterized by a Peer-to-peer based decentralized architecture whereby basic security and privacy problems as well as the lack of a priori trust and incentives are addressed by leveraging on real-life trust between users, such that services like data storage or profile data routing are performed by peers who trust one another in the social network.


Safebook client is written in python and is composed of four different managers: the Communication Manager, in charge of sending and receiving network pakets; the peer-to-peer Manager, which builds the peer-to-peer overlay; the Matryoshka Manager, which builds the social network overlay; and the User Manager which implements the user interface. It is an event-driven application. Once started, Safebook client spawns a dispatcher thread spawning, in turn, all managers. While the main process runs the program console, the dispatcher dequeues messages and sends them to the interested managers according to a classical publish/subscribe paradigm. Once a manager dequeues a message, it runs the appropriate routine to execute a particular job, then generates a message and enqueues it to the dispatcher or it sends it in the network (the communication manager). While the communication manager spawns udp and tcp server processes, targeting the peer-to-peer and matryoshka communication respectively, the user manager runs a local webserver. The user interface has been implemented as a webpage, similar to all current social network services.

This software package implements the functionality initially described in Section 4 of SOCIALNETS Deliverable D3.2. and subsequently used to produced the new and finalising results shown in Deliverable D3.3