[dundee] BBC NEWS | Technology | This website will self-destruct...

[Nicholas Walker]

it's an awesome concept, but for one flaw in my opinion.


"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<http://azureus.sourceforge.net/index.php>Distributed Hash
Table as the underlying P2P network. Our prototype by
default supports data timeouts of 8--9
hours<http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/faq.html#How_much_flexibility>,
though longer timeouts are possible. "



This seems a very unreliable method of timing the key destruction. Also what
happens if you can only obtain 50% of the key?


It's clever, but there's still work to be done.


On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:06 AM, Rick Moynihan <rick.moynihan at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/8/13 Robert Ladyman <it at file-away.co.uk>:
> > Interesting approach.
> >
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8197449.stm
>
> It's pretty awesome isn't it?  I ran into it sometime last week.
>
> Not sure how practical it is, but you can find more details on
> achieving the previously impossible here:
>
> http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/
>
> R.
>
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-- 


Nick Walker
Vice President : The Linux Society
UAD Ethical Hacker
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