Abstract

In Peer to peer systems, like in life, an individual peer needs to build social relations; seek help and learn from the experiences of other individuals, in order to facilitate her existence. There are several important issues that are raised while designing and implementing social networking in a completely distributed manner. Is the social information going to be stored locally or with friends and other peers in the network? Further, keeping in mind the non-binding dynamic nature of IP addresses and also dependence on computer hardware such as storage for holding local records for friends, past experiences etc, how is it possible for a peer to be able to login from anywhere with her credentials, and regain her status and records? In this paper we propose a design, and implementation in Tribler.org, of the solution to these problems, using user input dependent hash keys to generate mobile identifiers for peers. These identifiers, together with data management techniques to allow them to regain their social status and records of other important experiences, give peers a permanent identity in a fully decentralized distributed system, unbound to any single IP address or particular piece of computer hardware.