Peer-to-peer communication in web browsers using WebRTC A detailed overview of WebRTC and what security and network concerns exists

Sammanfattning: The web platform has a critical gap where a native proprietary application like Skype can do something a web application can’t. The intention of WebRTC is to close this gap by connecting users to each other in real-time simply by loading a web page. WebRTC is technology enabling peer-to-peer communication via browsers, plugin-free. It’s still a new technology and has not yet been finally standardized, nor does it come without new privacy- and security concerns. Some say that it will change the landscape of web applications while others say it’s overrated. This thesis aims to describe WebRTC, how and why it works and goes in-depth on some of the security and privacy concerns it faces. Every intermediate part will be explained in order to understand howWebRTC functions under the hood. After reading this thesis, developers should have a general idea of howWebRTC works and what concerns you need to think about when developing with WebRTC. They should also have learned that there are JavaScript libraries that simplifies how to do this in a satisfactory fashion. The paper concludes that WebRTC will potentially change the landscape of web applications but also that it will probably not happen before it is fully standardized.