Sedas: A Self Destructive Active Storage Framework for Data Privacy

Personal data that we store in the Cloud may contain account numbers, passwords, notes, and other important information that could be used and misused by a miscreant, a competitor, or a court of law. These data are cached and copied by Cloud Service Providers, often without users? authorization and control. Self-destructing data mainly aims at protecting the user data?s privacy. All the data and their copies become destructed or unreadable after a user-specified time, without any information to user. In addition, the decryption key is destructed after the user-specified time. In this paper, we present a system that meets this challenge through a novel integration of cryptographic techniques with active storage techniques. We implemented a proof-of-concept self destructive prototype. Through functionality and security properties evaluations of this prototype, the results demonstrate that the system is practical to use and meets all the privacy-preserving goals described. Compared to the system without self-destructing data mechanism, throughput for uploading and downloading with the proposed system acceptably decreases, while latency for upload/download operations with self-destructing data mechanism increases.