Self-destroying data for the web
Summary: Given how hard it is to save data you want, losing data you don't want - like drunken party pictures - should be easy. It isn't, as the inventors of Vanish found. But there's still hope.
Given how hard it is to save data you want (see The Universe hates your data), losing data you don't want - like drunken party pictures - should be easy. It isn't, as the inventors of Vanish found. But there's still hope.
Problem Youth and foolishness go hand-in-hand. But the power of the web means that silliness can now be stored and found with the speed of a Google search. You don't want sexy love notes - or pictures - to a former flame posted for all to see after infatuation sours.
Or maybe you want to discuss marital, health or work problems with a friend over email - and don't want your musings to be later shared with others. Wouldn't it be nice to know that such messages will become unreadable even if your "friend" is Linda Tripp?
Researchers built a prototype service - Vanish - that seeks to:
. . . ensure that all copies of certain data become unreadable after a user-specified time, without any specific action on the part of a user, without needing to trust any single third party to perform the deletion, and even if an attacker obtains both a cached copy of that data and the user's cryptographic keys and passwords.
That's a tall order. Their 1st proof-of-concept failed. But they are continuing the fight.
Vanish In Vanish: Increasing Data Privacy with Self-Destructing Data Roxana Geambasu, Tadayoshi Kohno, Amit A. Levy and Henry M. Levy of the University of Washington computer science department present an architecture and a prototype to do just that.
Ironically, the project utilizes the same P2P infrastructures that preserves and distribute data: BitTorrent's VUZE distributed hash table (DHT) client.
The basic idea is this: Vanish encrypts your data with a random key, destroys the key, and then sprinkles pieces of the key across random nodes of the DHT. You tell the system when to destroy the key and your data goes poof!
They built a Firefox plug-in for Gmail to create self-destructing emails and another - FireVanish - for making any text in a web input box self-destructing. They also built a file app, so you can make any file self-destructing. Handy for those Word backup files that you may not want to keep around.
Unfortunately the first prototype of Vanish turned out to be crackable, as a group of researchers at UT Austin, Princeton, and U of Michigan proved. They showed that an eavesdropper could collect the key shards from the DHT and reassemble the "vanished" content.
Oh, well, back to the drawing board. The Vanish team continues their work.
The Storage Bits take The Internet is removing our privacy even faster than the Roberts court. While young people may think it no great loss, check back in 20 years and we'll see what you think then.
In the 1930's many believed that capitalism may have reached the end of its usefulness and that socialism or even communism might offer a better way. During WWII, America allied itself with communist Russia - which bore the brunt of the fighting - to defeat Hitler.
Yet a few years after WWII - in one of America's periodic attacks of unreasoning fear and paranoia - suspected communist "sympathizers" were subjected to harassment, job loss and even blacklisting if they had been too supportive of our former ally. Robert Oppenheimer, who lead the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, was only one of the most prominent and loyal Americans to be persecuted.
You don't have to be Tiger Woods to want to keep your private life private. I hope the Vanish team succeeds.
Comments welcome, of course.
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Talkback
print & scan
(Not that I would know from experience ...)
And how about just the old trick of setting the system date on the computer to some time before the destruction date?
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
Yes, I believe your recipient could defeat Vanish by copying and scanning, but that is a lot of work. Likewise, phone calls can be recorded, but they usually aren't.
Robin
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
Yes, the Russians did hard work in Europe but keep in mind that the US was essentially alone in the Pacific; they didn't bother with that until land-grab time. The sacrifices made by Britain were pretty important to the Russians--as well as American lend-lease.
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
Vanish could be set to maintain your records only as long as legally required. But the main purpose is to improve privacy.
All the WWII allies made critical contributions. Nonetheless, the USSR lost ?9-10 million in military deaths while the US & UK combined lost less than a million dead. Germany lost ?5.5 million.
Robin
Re: Russian losses in WW II
Despite the remarkable multi-episode documentary "The World at War," too many Americans think that WE, with a little help from the Brits, won the war. So ignorant, so unfair, especially when one considers that citizens of the USSR had just lived through hell in the 30s and had to take up arms in 41.
Don't forget Chirchill's famous quote
When talking about why he would ally with Stalin when he had always been a staunch anti-communist:
"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. "
Basically the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend though a temporary alliance may be in my interest.
Look below for counterpoints
As they wont "take" where they belong in this thread.
Just store it all on an Apple
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
This problem is only solvable as a theoretical problem in academia under an artificial set of constraints, not as a real world problem. "Stuff" once released to the internet is forever.
Sure, but it's a LOT of effort.
Photographs, printing and rescanning (or just keeping a paper copy) could all defeat such a scheme. But it would be a whole lot of effort. It gets back to the old idea that if someone knowledgeable enough (a bad guy) is targeting you specifically you are in big trouble no matter what you do. But that doesn't mean that precautions are not worthwhile.
Also, for photography or print and scan to work, the other person had to think to do it at the time (i.e. before the data self destructed). If they didn't take these actions at the time, it would be too late to do so later.
Data
Will barely work even in a cloud environment
But even then, as an early poster pointed out, just grab your phone and take a digital photo of the monitor.
Aside from the digital photo issue, the only real way to make it work is some sort of DRM built into the NIC and NIC driver. If a special eyes-only communication comes in, a compliant driver exchanges a validation with the sender (to assure the sender the recipient is compliant). The data is then handled much like copyprotected HD video.
Only works if the users involved agree on privacy
Attacks by a party that purposely subverts the self-destruction intent BEFORE the sell-by-date are outside of the scope of Vanish, and thus Vanish is not applicable to data like Facebook pages that is routinely scraped and archived in other systems.
The paper presents an example scenario involving confidential email between two parties who agree that the emails should not persist past their expiry date. In the discussion, it is suggested that if there is a chance that their email provider may be decapsulating the emails (i. e. storing a cached version without the time-bomb), they need to use regular encryption such as PGP in addition to Vanish.
So, all in all, a rather academic effort at this point. But still an important area of research.
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
Maybe because...
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
Easy. This asshole obviously has a political axe to grind. Somehow he thinks that it is proper to express and promote his political views in a tech piece.
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
Russia bore the brunt of much fighting, but, without the USes assistance in manufacturing experitse, supplies, loans, and even personnel, they would have LOST!!! Without Russia fighting, Britain would have LOST!!
Ultimately Russia's huge losses were due to the same issues that Totalitarian gubmints usually have. The troops are ill trained, basically cannon fodder, and many do not WANT to fight!! Please note the HUGE difference between Stalin and Hitler was that Hitler was a POPULAR leader who the people WANTED to support and were WILLING to go to war for!!!
Ultimately the US should have delayed supporting Russia until Stalin was destroyed and Hitler had damaged his war machine doing it. Ideally they would have fought to a draw. Unfortunately the many Communist and general Socialist supporters, including FDR, in the US opted to jump in early and save the Evil Empire!!!
Re: Russian losses in WW II
[i]Had Stalin not purged the ranks of many of his high ranking officers before the German attack, the Russian losses might well have been less. He made other mistakes in handling the Russian military--a lack of preparedness being one--though none so foolish as Hitler.[/i]
Though none so foolish as Hitler? Wha?? Other than perhaps interfering at times more than most heads of state would or could, how do you draw any such comparison? Stalin's knowledge of commanding troops basically amounted to throwing them en masse at any obstacle. He can thank his lucky stars he had so many bodies (and reserves) to sacrifice in utterly desultory fashion. He basically bled the Germans white, but at a mind-numbing cost.
[i]Many Americans think that WE, with a little help from the Brits, won the war. So ignorant, so unfair...[/i]
Au contrere. Looking past any obvious grandstanding, the Americans WERE the tipping point and power in the war (forget the Brits). Without lend-lease born of American industrial might, neither the Russian Marxists or British could have resisted the German war machine. The American military could not have either, not alone at least. If German blitzkrieg tactics didn't complete the job in the Soviet expanses, 'wonder weapons' under development would have (the same ones that powered us to the moon and beyond years later). [Btw we're still recycling Nazi technology to this day]
The only thing that could have negated Hitler's [i]Wunderwaffen[/i] was the atomic bomb resultant of the Manhattan project as undertaken by the USA. But again, the Soviets had no answer to advanced German weaponry, other than perhaps an overreliance on manpower, and of course General Winter (since Stalin had butchered his best and brightest beforehand, largely due to his paranoia - with a little well-timed assistance from the German Gestapo).
Read KuhnKat above me for more.
Churchill's pithy bias
[i]When talking about why he would ally with Stalin when he had always been a staunch anti-communist...[/i]
Hypocricy, expediency and desperation by any other name... That included drawing a line to reconstitute ancient borders (and destroy or displace millions of people in the process) at the end of the conflict to keep Uncle Joe happy. How perfectly Hitlerian of him and FDR (et al).
[i]"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." [/i]
And he did. The devil's name was Stalin, who, lost in all the smoke and highfalutin rhetoric being slung around, made Hitler seem like a well intentioned chap by comparison.
[i]Basically the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend though a temporary alliance may be in my interest.[/i]
Yeah lay that Machiavellian logic on all of the Europeans who had the misfortune of succumbing to the red banner, at the vanguard of which were millions of raping and pillaging Bolshevik "allies," funded to the hilt by American lend lease dollars. This is beyond the countless millions plowed into camp dust within Soviet borders at the hands of the Cheka and NKVD long before Adolf made the scene.
Yes Winston, power to your enemy's enemies, which were your own all along - only greater. Oh wait, socialism is still on the march, thanks to such divine intervention. Thus the efforts of Stalin and his Marxist henchmen live on. All the while Hollywood and the mass media bootlicks the same, uncritical storylines in our faces with their pompous and one-sided indoctrinations.
RE: Self-destroying data for the web
I hardly think I would be worried about someone trying to sell Giclee's of my artwork by using a cell-phone photo of a computer-monitor image as the "original" LOL.
I'm just saying...