Musubi: Middleware for Secure Mobile Collaborative Applications
Willem Bult · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2013
As we work more and more while on the go, mobile collaborative applications will play an increasingly important role in our lives. We note that the conventional client/server model for these applications poses several shortcomings. The model is unintuitive and unnecessarily complex. Centralized servers further introduce cost, inflexibility, and concerns about privacy. Musubi is a middleware for mobile collaborative applications based on a top-level peer-to-peer architecture and secure group communication. We demonstrate how a secure messenger application can be built on top of our system. Three diverse case studies in citizen journalism, cross-generational interaction, and computer science education are used to evaluate the middleware. We show that Musubi simplifies the development of collaborative applications. The created applications are transport agnostic and can provide a good user experience while using fully end-to-end encrypted communication.