A secure self-destructing scheme for electronic data

Abstract

As more and more services and applications are emerging in the Internet, exposing sensitive electronic data in the Internet has become easier. We propose a secure self-destructing scheme for electronic data (SSDD), which can protect a userʼs sensitive electronic data by making the sensitive data automatically destructed after a period of time. Specifically, we first encrypt the data into a ciphertext. Then, we associate the ciphertext, and extract a part of the ciphertext to make it incomplete. Finally, we distribute both the decryption key and the extracted ciphertext into a distributed hash table (DHT) network. To recover the plaintext, both the decryption key and the extracted ciphertext should be obtained from the DHT network before the pre-configured period of time. By security analysis, we show that the SSDD scheme can resist against not only the attacks in the DHT network, but also the traditional cryptanalysis and the brute-force attack.