New P2P-based technology self-destructs messages after 8 hours
Posted on | July 27, 2009 | 1 comment
A group of professors and grad students at the University of Washington has created some nifty free technology that can make all the emails and social network messages you type disappear after a period of time. The technology is called Vanish. It’s outside-the-box thinking attendees at the Black Hat security conference might want to check out.
“If people understood the implications of where and how their e-mail is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often,” says Tadayoshi Kohno, a UW assistant professor of computer science.
You can set Vanish to self-destruct e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages automatically, making them irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers, says Roxana Geambasu, the lead grad student on the project.
For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same type used as part of peer-to-peer networks designed to share music or movie files. (The Vanish project uses the Vuze worldwide file-sharing network.)
The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.
The default time for the vanishing act to begin is eight hours. All copies of a Vanish-encrypted message are readable up to that point. After that point, all copies of the Vanish-encrypted message melt away — like a message in the sand at high tide — irrespective of where it is stored.
“A major advantage of Vanish is that users don’t need to trust us, or any service that we provide, to protect or delete the data,” Geambasu says.
At this point, Vanish is not being prepared to sell to corporations. “We do believe that Vanish addresses a very important problem, however, and would like to see a solution like Vanish eventually become available for business and other uses,” says Geambasu.
Photo: Lead author Roxana Geambasu, a UW doctoral student, and undergraduate student Amit Levy helped create Vanish. Courtesy UW
–by Byron Acohido
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A new program Vanishing Message has been released by John Kapili. Vanishing Message is a file message that can be sent by email attachment or file transfer. The message can be read by the recipient then vanishes without a trace. As we all know there are times when we need to send a message to someone that we want no trace of later. Vanishing Message uses a random encryption on all words, no word is ever encrypted the same. The message vanishes if exited, cannot be copied, if viewed longer than 1 minute it vanishes and you can use the same file to forward or email another person a new message. So prove it!!! Did it ever exist?
http://www.JohnKapili.com
http://www.johnkapili.com/news.php?item.39.1
Comment by John — 9/23/2009 @ 8:13 am