Vanish: Digital data Self-destruction Software

You must have heard of spy paper, the self-destructive paper in which the content vanishes after a certain time. For more there are self destructive message services that are sand lost to the surf once read.  The same idea works for the web world. Vanish is a researched system designed that allows the users control over the lifetime of any personal digital data stored on the web or in a cloud. With Vanish all the copies of encrypted data, even archived or cached copies, would become permanently unreadable after a certain specified time. According to researchers, there will be a greater demand for encrypting messages as personal and business information would be  stored in centralized machines or clouds.

How safe is your data on Web?

People store vast amount of personal and private data stored on the web or in the cloud. The outside end-user’s control. For instance a confidential email send to your close acquaintance; you have absolutely no idea where the email will be stored and when will it be deleted. The Web-based email might keep a backup even if you delete the message. In a similar way, when you send a message via Google Docs or Facebook you might not have any idea about location and time for which the copies of your data will be stored.

Clearly, the users has no clue about the lifetime of their data stored in the cloud. This could be a potential security threat for private data, as the data could be disclosed weeks months or years after that data was first stored, which the user assumes to be deleted. These private data could be compromised by hackers or exposed due to misconfiguration on a web service, or it might be used in legal proceedings.

Vanish directly addresses this problem with its self destructing data process.

Key Features Vanish

Although Vanish resembles some properties of existing encryption systems like PGP, it provides some marked differences in features.

• To begin with, anyone using Vanish to encrypt/encapsulate information, such as an email never learns the encryption key.
• With each encrypted message there is a pre-specified timeout.
• Before the timeout the message can be read by anyone. After timeout, no one can read the message, as the encryption is lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes. Once the email expires, it is impossible to decrypt/decapsulate it.

How secure is Vanish?

Vanish adopts an unique approach for data security that involves shattering an encryption key that was held by neither party in an email exchange but is widely scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing system. The software uses key-based encryption system and the decrypted message is automatically re-encrypted making it completely secured from hacking.

The pieces of key small numbers tend to erode overtime as they get out of use. In order to erode the keys, or timeout, Vanish takes advantage of the structure of a peer-to-peer file system. These networks are based on millions of personal computers whose Internet address change as they arrive and leave the network. Since the Internet Protocol keeps on changing randomly, it’s extremely difficult to reassemble the pieces of the key. The Vanish Technology is applicable for more than just email  or other electronic message. Vanish prototype uses the Vuze Bittorrent Distributed Hash Table as the underlying P2P network.

Vanish uses public key cryptography that makes it possible for parties who have never physically met to share a digital secret and as a result engage in a secure electronic conversation shelter from potential eavesdroppers.

Using Firefox Vanish plugin a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, Facebook message or blog comment specifying that the document or message should vanish in 8-9 hours. However, much longer timeouts are possible. For instance, you can create a Google Doc document, an email, a Facebook message, or a blog comment that would vanish after 8-hours.

Additional advantages

Vanish no only allows the users to control the lifetime of their web content, but much more. Vanish offers a broad variety of applicability. Vanish is available both as main application as well as Firefox Vanish. There are other application that can similarly leverage the main Vanish application.

Overcoming the pitfalls

The legal aspect of using this software have still to be sorted out. There are some glitches in the software that are designed based on plugin module for Mozilla’s Firefox browser and the technology can be used only by the parties who have the same copy. If the shortcomings are worked upon, Vanish can have immense possibilities for sensitive and secret information.

Download here to take a try