US: Self-destruction date for digital information using Vanish

Vanish, or “self-destructing digital data” is a software project of the University of Washington which aims to restrict the readability of digital information to a certain time limit.

This project goes against the current internet trend, which is to save data forever, essentially. For this reason, many archiving services store websites and website information for unlimited periods. The user thus loses control over his or her own data; for instance, entries in social networks. Once an entry has been made it is very difficult, if not impossible to retract it again.

Vanish counters this phenomenon by using encryption mechanisms similar to those used by systems such as PGP. Vanish differs from these products in that its encryption is kept secret from all users, including the sender. The key is fragmented and distributed all over the world using P2P.

Vanish automatically recombines the decryption key fragments that are necessary to read the data. With the help of this function, information is no longer readable if even one key fragment is no longer available. The user is able to configure the use-by date of his information.

Even if this method seems to be nothing more than playing around, companies should keep this trend in mind, especially where electronic transactions must be legally documented. For instance, scenarios are possible in which a contract acceptance with a use-by date is terminated, leaving no evidence available after a certain period. A normal digital archive would be worthless in this case, as the information saved to the archive would be governed by the same time limit. Only a printed version of the Vanish coded information would be left as proof. Even this printout could be a digital PDF document.

At this time it is not possible to tell if Vanish or a possible successor will be adopted. In any case, this type of technology should not be used by businesses, for reasons of legal security.