Venyu Blog

I have to admit there’s something positively James Bondish about self-destructing data. Maybe it’s because the very idea of it conjures up visions of Peter Graves as Jim Phelps accepting his team’s next “Mission Impossible” over a portable tape that simmers, smokes and self-destructs once it has surrendered its contents.

“Vanish,” a cutting-edge software solution developed by a group of researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle uses peer-to-peer networks to create encryption keys presenting the idea that digital data has a shelf life. At its core, Vanish is user-defined data destruction. It begins as simply as a user highlighting the text they want to encrypt. A single mouse click creates a secret encryption key that’s ultimately divided and stored in various places on peer to peer networks. As computers log on and off these constantly changing peer-to-peer networks, pieces of the key eventually become inaccessible – meaning that the original data cannot be decrypted or read, even by the sender. This work-in-progress is reserved mainly for the academic community and not yet practical for the rest of us who know there really is no expiration date on user data. Except, I suppose, in the case of self-destructing messages.