Vanish Firefox plugin Self Destructing Data!

Computing and communicating through the Web makes it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview; a lost or stolen laptop can expose personal photos or messages; or a legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating or just embarrassing details from the past.

Vanish seeks to protect the privacy of past, archived data — such as copies of emails maintained by an email provider — against accidental, malicious, and legal attacks. Specifically, we wish to ensure that all copies of certain data become unreadable after a user-specified time, without any specific action on the part of a user, without needing to trust any single third party to perform the deletion, and even if an attacker obtains both a cached copy of that data and the user’s cryptographic keys and passwords.

Vanish is a research project aimed at meeting this challenge through a novel integration of cryptographic techniques with distributed systems. We initially implemented a proof-of-concept Vanish prototype that uses the million-node Vuze BitTorrent DHT to create self-destructing data. For a description of our Vuze-based self-destructing data system, please refer to this paper. Read more about Vanish at the official website.

The Vanish Firefox Plugin source code is available here under MPL license (license file included in the tarball). It can be used with Firefox 3.0+!