Comments on: Vanish: Self-Destructing Digital Data

By: Dez

Dez — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:48:15 +0000

I think I may definitely look into the firefox plugin itself since the plugin seems to control the ability to see the message. If you can recompile the plugin to ignore the expiration date, you can see the message contained regardless. That's completely ignoring the fact that you could just get the decryption routing from the plugin and read any Vanish message.

I like the idea, but I don't see it being used with too many actual security areas. Besides, who relies on gmail or any other free service to send emails that need need encryption.

By: Will

Will — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:02:12 +0000

Like Josh has said, there are always ways of breaking the encryption and keeping the data. For example, once the message or document has been decrypted, it will not stop the user from copying the message somewhere's else. Also, a trick I've used for keeping time trials of some software longer (up to several years) is to keep turning back the system clock on the computer. The software will never expire any of the documents or licenses you'll be using.

By: sidelobe

sidelobe — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 05:55:06 +0000

This looks to me to be pretty good. I scanned the paper, and the use of DHTs to truly make the keys go away after a period of time seems pretty secure. With conventional encryption, somebody will eventually be able to decrypt the plaintext. If the plaintext is, in turn, a VDO, then the message is still safe.

The details are hard, especially protecting against the attacks of a sniffer collecting the information sent to the DHTs. But that problem has largely been solved.

It'll be interesting to see what the crypto community does with this research. I hope we see it popping up everywhere, especially considering that the American public has already paid for it.

By: Hsilamot

Hsilamot — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:58:49 +0000

c'mon just use a network sniffer, you can store all the data that is flowing ¬¬

also what stops me from saving the decrypted content?

By: Josh Miller

Josh Miller — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:50:45 +0000

One thing my many years of computer use has taught me is that there is ALWAYS a way to a) copy data and b) Break encryption.

Granted this will likely thwart casual users. Data never ever has a shelf life however. There's always a "fix" for this sort of thing.