Vanish and Data Expiry (Was Re: Death and Berevement)

Le 27 juil. 09 à 14:25, Melvin Carvalho a écrit :

> Related is the topic of expiring data.  This was discussed on
> dataportability some time back, but not sure of the final conclusion.
> There's also the Vanish project:
>
> http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/
>
> Which might be useful.

Seriously, Vanish is just a university trying to generate some PR on  
what is becoming a trendy theme in the social networks world. I guess  
the authors behind the paper were just trying to have some fun and  
didn't pretend they were gonna take the world by storm, but the buzz  
around that service got seriously out of hand.

The implementation is less than poor and the whole design has some  
serious holes in it. For example, anybody who has access to an  
encrypted message also has access to its non-encrypted form. So they  
talk about leaving Google and Facebook out of the loop but in reality,  
all these companies have to do is to decrypt all vanish-encrypted  
messages when they're posted on their service and store a local copy  
in the clear, possibly for ever… Also, there is no concept of  
signature or even authorship, so the data can just be decrypted & copy- 
pasted in its clear form across services and stick on the interwebs  
just as non-Vanish data does.

Vanish is not a solution for data expiry, not even close to it. It's  
just a few guys having fun, mashing up different tools into something  
with no definite use case or potential for mass-adoption.


Cheers,
Tim



- - - - - - -
Tim Anglade | director, “Turbulences” dpt. | af83
42, boulevard de Sébastopol | 75003 Paris | France
1436, Howard St | San Francisco | CA 94103 | USA
Tel : +33 1 42 72 33 32
Mob : +33 6 35 92 77 58
Skype : timanglade
Web : www.af83.com

This email is:  [X] bloggable   [ ] ask first   [ ] private

Received on Monday, 27 July 2009 13:02:44 UTC