Here today, gone today ELEGE: Ephemeral links — Encrypt, Glimpse, and Eliminate

Web structure mining attempts to use modeling techniques, such as graph theory, to represent the connection between web pages through hyperlinks, on the Internet. Static or flat web pages remain on a web server until a human removes them. Dynamic and active web pages are created by programs at the time a user accesses a hyperlink. This inclusion of dynamic content by the Internet has allowed its structure to dynamically explode and morph. In this work, we introduce the entity of the ephemeral link, which induces an inverse morphing operation. We present a methodology and implementation where pages are dynamically removed in real time by a web-user accessing the page and clicking these links. In this paper, we emphasize the justification for ephemeral links in the realm of high security and present the architecture and algorithms of system ELEGE (read “elegy”) that implements the creation and use of ephemeral links.