Vaultage: automatic generation of secure communication around decentralised user-managed data vaults

Abstract

The storage of user data in centralised systems is a standard procedure followed by online service providers such as social networks. This requires users to trust these providers, and, to some extent, users are not in complete control over their data. A potential way to bring back this control is the promotion of user-managed data vaults, i.e., encrypted storage systems located in personal devices. Enabling communication between these data vaults could allow creating decentralised applications where users decide which data to share, and with whom. Nevertheless, developing such decentralised applications requires a considerable amount of work, as well as expertise in deploying secure peer-to-peer communication systems. We present Vaultage, a model-based framework that can simplify the development of data vault-based applications by automatically generating a secure communication infrastructure from a domain-specific model. We demonstrate the core features of Vaultage through a decentralised social network application case study, and we report on the findings of evaluation experiments that show Vaultage's code generation capabilities and some performance analysis of the generated network components.