SeDas: A Self-Destructing Data System Based on Active Storage Framework

Personal data stored 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, copied, and archived by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), 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 user intervention. In addition, the decryption key is destructed after the user-specified time. In this paper, we present SeDas, a system that meets this challenge through a novel integration of cryptographic techniques with active storage techniques based on T10 OSD standard. We implemented a proof-of-concept SeDas prototype. Through functionality and security properties evaluations of the SeDas prototype, the results demonstrate that SeDas 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 SeDas acceptably decreases by less than 72%, while latency for upload/download operations with self-destructing data mechanism increases by less than 60%.