SafeVanish: An Improved Data Self-Destruction for Protecting Data Privacy

In the background of cloud, self-destructing data mainly aims at protecting the data privacy. All the data and its copies will become destructed or unreadable after a user-specified period, without any user intervention. Besides, anyone cannot get the decryption key after timeout, neither the sender nor the receiver. The Washington´s Vanish system is a system for self-destructing data under cloud computing, and it is vulnerable to “hopping attack” and “sniffer attack”. We propose a new scheme in this paper, called Safe Vanish, to prevent hopping attacks by way of extending the length range of the key shares to increase the attack cost substantially, and do some improvement on the Shamir Secret Sharing algorithm implemented in the Original Vanish system. We present an improved approach against sniffing attacks by using the public key cryptosystem to protectt from sniffing operations. In addition, we evaluate analytically the functionality of the proposed Safe Vanish system.