Relevant Links
Press Release
Research Papers
Media Contact
Keywords
Internet, security, privacy, P2P, encryption, cryptography, distributed hash tables
Buzz
COMPUTING RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT OF THE WEEK [July 24 - 31, 2009]
Vanish: A Tool to Make Online Personal Data Self-Destruct
Computing and communicating through the Web makes it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview; a lost or stolen laptop can expose personal photos or messages; or a legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating or just embarrassing details from the past.
Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data - even archived or cached copies - will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.
For example, using the Firefox Vanish plugin, a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment - specifying that the document or message should "vanish" in 8 hours. Before that 8-hour timeout expires, anyone who has access to the data can read it; however after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content - not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data - regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout - simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.
A technical research paper describing Vanish will appear at the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, a top peer-reviewed publication venue for computer security research.
Researchers:
Roxana Geambasu [http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/roxana/]
Tadayoshi Kohno [http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/yoshi/]
Hank Levy [http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/levy/]
Amit Levy [http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/levya/]
Research support provided by:
National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Intel Corp.
‹ Current Highlight | Past Highlights ›
Computing Research Highlight of the Week is a service of the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association designed to highlight some of the exciting and important recent research results in the computing fields. Each week a new highlight is chosen by CRA and CCC staff and volunteers from submissions from the computing community. Want your research featured? Submit it!.
