Capability-Based Access Control for Peer-to-Peer Data Sharing

This paper describes SharedViews, a peer-to-peer data management system that simplifies file organization and facilitates file sharing and protection among home users on the Internet. The key innovation of SharedViews is the integration of queries and dynamic views from database systems with a capability-based protection model from the operating systems world. Users organize their files using views and share their views by exchanging capabilities. We show that the resulting system is easy to use and provides clients with flexible protection, but without the account creation and centralized protection management problems inherent in current shared-data systems. We have prototyped SharedViews on a small network of Linux-based personal computers. We present the architecture of our prototype and use simple measurements to demonstrate the practicality and performance of our approach.