Securely sharing and managing personal content is a challenging task in multi-device environments. In this paper, we design and implement a new platform called personal content networking (PCN). Our work is inspired by content-centric networking (CCN) because we aim to enable access to personal content using its name instead of its location. The unique challenge of PCN is to support secure file operations such as replication, updates, and access control over distributed untrusted devices. The primary contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a secure content management platform that supports secure updates, replications, and fine-grained content-centric access control of files. Furthermore, we demonstrate its feasibility through a prototype implementation on the CCNx skeleton.
This paper proposes a new storage model, device transparency, in which users view and manage their entire data collection from any of their devices, even from disconnected storage-limited devices holding only a subset of the entire collection. The Unmanaged Internet Architecture (UIA) provides zero-configuration connectivity among mobile devices through personal names. Users assign personal names through an ad hoc device introduction process requiring no central allocation. Once assigned, names bind securely to the global identities of their target devices independent of network location. Each user manages one namespace, shared among all the user's devices and always available on each device. Users can also name other users to share resources with trusted acquaintances. Devices with naming relationships automatically arrange connectivity when possible, both in ad hoc networks and using global infrastructure when available. A UIA prototype demonstrates these capabilities using optimistic replication for name resolution and group management and a routing algorithm exploiting the user's social network for connectivity. Users are increasingly inundated with small devices with communication and storage capabilities. Unfortunately, the user is still responsible for reconciling all of the devices whenever a change is made. We present Footloose, a user-centered data store that can share data and reconcile conflicts across diverse devices. Footloose is an optimistic system based on physical eventual consistency: consistency based on the movement of devices, and selective conflict resolution, which allows conflicts to flow through devices that cannot resolve the conflict to devices that can. Using these techniques, Footloose can present consistent views of data on the devices closest to the user without user interaction. This paper presents the design and implementation of a mobile storage system called a Personal-RAID. PersonalRAID manages a number of disconnected storage devices. At the heart of a Personal-RAID system is a mobile storage device that transparently propagates data to ensure eventual consistency. Using this mobile device, a PersonalRAID provides the abstraction of a single coherent storage name space that is available everywhere, and it ensures reliability by maintaining data redundancy on a number of storage devices. One central aspect of the PersonalRAID design is that the entire storage system consists solely of a collection of storage logs; the log-structured design not only provides an efficient means for update propagation, but also allows efficient direct I O accesses to the logs without incurring unnecessary log replay delays. The PersonalRAID prototype demonstrates that the system provides the desired transparency and reliability functionalities without imposing any serious performance penalty on a mobile storage user.