Social VPN

The Social VPN Project

This is a free and open-source P2P Social Virtual Private Network (VPN) that seamlessly networks your computer with the computers of your friends so that:

• Your computer can communicate directly to computers of your friends, and all communication is encrypted and authenticated. In other words, you are in full control of who you connect to and all your communications are private.
• This private network is configured with no hassle. The social VPN does all the configuration automatically for you. All you and your friends need to do is run this software and log in to your social network.
• You and your friends can communicate, share and collaborate in countless ways, with existing applications, like iTunes, Windows shared folders, and remote desktop. You can share files and folders, stream music and video, play multi-user games, access remote desktops, and run a Web server private to your friends.
• If you own multiple computers at different places, you can also use the Social VPN to seamlessly access your files, desktop, etc remotely – creating your own personal VPN.

Here is a quick demonstration video the SocialVPN software at work.

The software

Our social VPN software is based on C# and is open source (licensed under GPL v2). Our source code is maintained at the SocialVPN github repository.

Social networks and systems supported

The current SocialVPN application runs on Windows and Linux-based computers and uses the Facebook social network.

Additional versions supporting Skype, an open-source Web-based user/relationship back-end (Drupal, Joomla) and decentralized key exchange using PGP-signed certificates are being actively developed – if you are am open-source developer interested in creating adapters for other social network back-ends, please contact us.

The P2P Overlay

An openly-accessible bootstrap SocialVPN virtual network currently runs on a wide-area testbed using resources on PlanetLab. You can also create your own overlay as well using IPOP (IP-over-P2P) overlay and SocialVPN routers.

News and Updates