Expiring Emails with Vanish
September 6th, 2009
Probably one of the most refreshing ideas I’ve heard of in a long time. Vanish, enable messages (e.g. email, google docs, facebook) to be transmitted, which disappear” after a period of time.
“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”
Similar to PGP, the messages are encrypted (the encryption key is never known to the user). The encrypted message is sent out and the encryption key is “scattered to the winds” of a P2P network.
The Vanish prototype uses the Vuze Bittorrent Distributed Hash Table as the underlying P2P network. Our prototype by default supports data timeouts of 8–9 hours, though longer timeouts are possible.
Categories: Unix(*nix)
