Bringing P2P to the web: security and privacy in the firecoral network.

Peer-to-peer systems have been a disruptive technology for enabling large-scale Internet content distribution. Yet web browsers, today's dominant application platform, seem inherently based on the client/server communication model. This paper presents the design of Firecoral, a browser-based extension platform that enables the peer-to-peer exchange of web content in a secure, flexible manner. Firecoral provides a highly-configurable interface through which users can enforce privacy preferences by carefully specifying which content they will share, and a security model that guarantees content integrity even in the face of untrusted peers. The Firecoral protocol is backwards compatible with today's web standards, integrates easily with existing web servers, and is designed not to interfere with a typical browsing experience and publishing ecosystem.