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RSS 2.0Thursday, September 10, 2009
Blog? Oh, this one?
If it weren’t for the monthly charges for the server, I could have forgotten about this blog. Oh well.
There are a couple of posts brewing and here’s a simple one to get me started.
Seen at Bruce Schneier’s: File Deletion.
File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. [...]
As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone, deleting data is much harder.
This is one of the reasons why I’m reluctant about all these social sites. I do have a Facebook account, but rarely use it. My basic take is that a) the more people I ‘friend’, the less I can say that I want everybody to hear and b) I don’t want to leave more digital footprints in the cloud that I can’t erase.
Schneier’s article refers to a product that tries to achieve that goal by transparently encrypting data and bit-rotting the keys, which amounts to self-destructing messages if everything works as intended. I certainly agree with the general approach; in order to preserve as much control over data hosted in the cloud as possible, I don’t immediately see an alternative to schemes that somehow pervert the concepts of public key encryption. Obviously, once something is decrypted it can be archived and distributed, but a crypto system that’s designed with repudiation (not non-repudiation!) in mind could come handy.
