How to Send a Self-Destructing Email: A Method of Self-Destructing Email System

Abstract

Before the project PRISM was revealed to the public by Edward Snowden only a few people realized emails were being watched by the government. For the benefits that Big Data technologies such as massive distributed storage and user behavior analysis and so on bring, emails became one of the most popular Big Data that has been aimed at as a huge source of intelligence by some organizations spying on public accounts every hour every day. Our research work was just opposite to what the NSA has done: To design and implement a system that can store emails securely, and destroy them clearly when they expired. In another word, a self-destructing emails system.

CloudSky: A Controllable Data Self-Destruction System for Untrusted Cloud Storage Networks

“…In this Big Data era personal data, communications and all the other personal privacies are just at stake [1], [2], [3], [4]. A common case is that the user private information could be visited by multiple agents in the course of service, each having different access rights for its own purposes.…”

“…These systems prefer P2P-like environments, but potentially face Sybil attacks [7] and, 2) those (e.g. [1], [15], [16]) that require a trusted third party (trusted authority) to manage and distribute the secrete key, thereby potentially facing scalability limitations.…”

“…Very recently, Wang et al [16] advanced DataAssociate algorithm and implemented SSDD (secure selfdestructing scheme for electronic data) which not only resists against the attacks in DHT networks but also addresses the traditional cryptanalysis and brute-force attacks. Fu et al [1] implemented a self-destructing email system by deleting one piece of the encrypted and split data, so the body of email is uncompleted and can never be compromised. However, these implementations potentially face scalability limitations due to large-scale dataset, it is still unable to address the problems we target at.…”