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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.

Motivation and Brief Description:

An enormous amount of private data is now stored on the web or in the cloud, outside the end-user's control. If you send a sensitive email to a close friend, for example, you have no idea where that email will be stored or when it will be deleted. Web-based email systems may back up the message, potentially forever, even if you delete it. Similarly, when you send a message via Facebook or create a Google Doc, you have no idea where and for how long copies of your data will be stored.

Given this situation, users cannot control the lifetimes of their data stored in the cloud. This amplifies privacy risks since private data (even thought to be deleted) could be disclosed weeks, months, or years after that data was first stored. There are known examples of data remaining in the cloud long after users explicitly request that data's deletion. Private data could be exposed by accidental misconfigurations on a web service, be compromised by hackers, or be used in legal proceedings. A 2004 news article says: Don't ever say anything on e-mail or text messaging that you don't want to come back and bite you.

We created self-destructing data to try to address this problem. Our prototype system, called Vanish, shares some properties with existing encryption systems like PGP, but there are also some major differences. First, someone using Vanish to "encrypt/encapsulate" information, like an email, never learns the encryption key. Second, there is a pre-specified timeout associated with each encrypted/encapsulated messages. Prior to the timeout, anyone can read the encrypted/encapsulated message. After the timeout, no one can read that message, because the encryption key is lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes. It is therefore impossible for anyone to decrypt/decapsulate that email after the timer expires.

Under the Hood:

Our technical paper, which will appear at the 18 th USENIX Security Symposium in August, describes the concepts behind Vanish in detail. Briefly, as mentioned above, the user never knows the encryption key. This means that there is no risk of the user exposing that key at some point in the future, perhaps through coercion, court order, or compromise. So what do we do with the key? We could escrow it with a third party, but that raises serious trust issues (e.g., the case with Hushmail).

Instead, we leverage an unusual storage media in a novel way: namely, global-scale peer-to-peer networks. Vanish creates a secret key to encrypt a user's data item (such as an email), breaks the key into many pieces and then sprinkles the pieces across the P2P network. As machines constantly join and leave the P2P network, the pieces of the key gradually disappear. By the time the hacker or someone with a subpoena actually tries to obtain access to the message, the pieces of the key will have permanently disappeared.

Our Vanish prototype uses the Vuze Bittorrent Distributed Hash Table as the underlying P2P network. Our prototype by default supports data timeouts of 8--9 hours, though longer timeouts are possible.

In many ways Vanish begins to approximate the ephemeral nature of a phone call. While our system is still a research prototype and we encourage people treat it with a skeptical eye for now (like any new security system), one could envision it or a derivative being used in corporate settings, when talking with lawyers, or when conducting a variety of private matters online. For example, many people pick up the phone instead of send an email for fear of leaving breadcrumbs of digital forensic trails. But now there's Vanish.

Vanishing Beyond the Web:

While Vanish prototype is focused on empowering users to control the lifetime of their web content, Vanish itself is much more broadly applicable than that. We provide for download both the main Vanish application and a Firefox Vanish plugin. The Firefox plugin uses the Vanish application as a client. Other applications can similarly leverage the main Vanish application.

For example, one can create a Vanishing trash bin application. Users could put data into the Vanish trash bin, and recover that data before the timer expires. After the timer expires, however, the data self-destructs and is no longer available. This self-destruction would even happen if the machine was turned off prior to expiration and someone, perhaps at a border crossing or with a warrant, were to seize the computer and create an exact copy of the computer's disks before the timeout occurs.

About the Researcher :

1. Henry M. Levy

Chairman and Wissner-Slivka Chair
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington

Henry M. Levy holds the Wissner-Slivka Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Hank's research projects focus on operating systems, distributed and parallel computing, the world-wide web, and computer architecture.

2. Tadayoshi Kohno

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington

3.  Roxana Geambasu:

Graduate Student
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
 

4.  Amit Levy

Undergraduate Student
Computer Science & Engineering
Economics
University of Washington

Tags:	Vanish - permanently unreadable - Firefox Vanish plugin - private data -
Research Documents:
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