A Secure Self-Destructing Scheme for Electronic Data

As more and more services and applications are emerging in the Internet, exposing user sensitive data in the Internet becomes more easily. The simplest way to protect the security of sensitive user data is to encrypt the data in advance, and then disclose the data decryption key only to those authorized users. However, the sensitive user data will be leaked while the decryption key is exposed to unauthorized users. In this paper, we propose a secure self-destructing scheme for electronic data (SSDD for short). We achieve this goal by first encrypting the data, and then distributing both the decryption key and a part of the cipher text into the distributed hash table (DHT) network. By security analysis, we show that our SSDD scheme can resist against not only the traditional cryptanalysis and the brute-force attacks, but also the attacks in the DHT network, such as the store sniffing attack, the lookup sniffing attack, and the standard DHT attacks.