An architecture of a social VPN is based on a centralized infrastructure where users authenticate, discover their friends and exchange cryptographic public keys, and a P2P overlay which is used to route messages between VPN endpoints.R. Figueiredo, P. O. Boykin, P. St. Juste, D. Wolinsky, "SocialVPNs: Integrating Overlay and Social Networks for Seamless P2P Networking", in Proceedings of IEEE WETICE/COPS, Rome, Italy, June 2008. For example, this allows an organization to have routed connections with separate offices, or with other organizations, over the Internet. A routed VPN connection across the Internet logically operates as a dedicated Wide Area Network (WAN) link.
