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First came the news this week that Amazon had angered customers of its Kindle electronic book service, by remotely deleting two of George Orwell’s books, Animal Farm and 1984. It seems Amazon allowed the books to be uploaded from a publisher that didn’t have the rights to the books, so it simply deleted them.

Now comes word that researchers have developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a period of time.

A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington, have developed new software dubbed “Vanish” which takes advantage of encryption technology. Apparently, it allows a message to automatically be encrypted after a specified period of time. The message, therefore, isn’t exactly destroyed, but it can no longer be read.

The university has a Web site offering more information on the technology, with this summary description:

“Our prototype system, called Vanish, shares some properties with existing encryption systems like PGP, but there are also some major differences. First, someone using Vanish to "encrypt/encapsulate" information, like an email, never learns the encryption key. Second, there is a pre-specified timeout associated with each encrypted/encapsulated messages. Prior to the timeout, anyone can read the encrypted/encapsulated message. After the timeout, no one can read that message, because the encryption key is lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes. It is therefore impossible for anyone to decrypt/decapsulate that email after the timer expires.”

The technology can be applied to more than just email, and the researchers say Vanish could be used to control the lifespan of any type of data stored in the cloud, including information in blogs, on Facebook, or Google documents. The software certainly could have come in handy for the folks at Twitter who suffered an embarrassing breach into their Google documents account and had sensitive financial documents stolen.

The technology will be welcomed by many private and public organizations who are under increasing pressure to protect the privacy of information. But it does raise a number of thorny legal issues. Certain laws do require corporations to archive emails and make them accessible at a later date. (The White House under the Bush administration must have gotten an early beta copy of the software.)

Vanish has been released as a free, open-source tool working with the Firefox Internet browser. Both the sender and recipient must have the software installed.
 

Comments (2)

	1. 07-21-2009 17:28
	This is frightening stuff, though perhaps some politicos will welcome it.. Registered

laton mccartney

	2. 07-24-2009 13:34
	It appears Amazon has seen the light on the deleting of the George Orwell books from Kindle devices. The funny thing about this, of course, was that if there were any two books you would not want to electronically delete - it would be Animal Farm and 1984. Anyway, here's the apology from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:    This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.  With deep apology to our customers,  Jeff Bezos  Founder & CEO  Amazon.com Registered

Mel Duvall

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