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Paranoid about Internet Security? Vanish is Here!
Techtree News Staff, Aug 19, 2009 1511 hrs ISTWorld's first self-destructing form of communication
E-mailing each other for various reasons has become a norm nowadays. It has more or less cemented its place as one of the most used forms of communication. The modern "letters" are all electronic in nature. If you really give it a thought, you'd be surprised to figure out the time since you last posted a letter, the "normal" way i.e, by posting it.
During the previous generation of post offices, post-men and letters, even confidential stuff were "on paper" and you could get rid of them whenever you want. Paper shredders, anyone? Besides, you only needed to worry about the mail being read in transit by a curious postal employee; something you really won't mind unless it was something really crucial - like a password to your ATM card, with the card of course.
How secure do you think communication through e-mail is? Well, it is pretty secure. However, if you give it due thought and research, you will learn that whenever you send an e-mail, between the time you send it and it reaches the recipient, it has made a digital copy of itself on all the intermediate servers used for the transmission. So, what you now have is a copy of your mail in your sent box, one in the inbox of the recipient and God knows how many on all those intermediate servers. And if you really have some powers (say, you're the U.S. Government?) you can actually "sniff" stuff from these servers and have fun reading your mails. Oh and by the way, this is completely legal. The EU and U.S. are authorized to sniff into your e-mails should they feel you're some kinda threat. The worst part is, even after you delete your e-mail for peace of mind, it STILL is out there somewhere!
It is this very privacy issue that has given rise to the introduction of Vanish, a free program that is designed to erase all the digital footprints of your e-mail after a few hours. In short, it's nothing but an e-mail with an expiry date. You have some time to read it and after that, it would be unpalatable. That 'some time' is 8-hours as of now. If you're the one who sent the mail, you would want to save a backup somewhere. Because, after eight hours, even you wouldn't be able to read it. Vanish is developed by Roxana Geambasu and Professor Hank Levy of The University of Washington. Vanish was born after Levy pondered over the fact that in today's age, the digital world has forgotten to forget, as he puts it! Whatever you do online, remains there albeit in a scrambled form, until one fine day, someone painstakingly deduces an online persona of yours and find out something about you which you wouldn't really want others to know. This holds true not just in case of e-mails, but also for social networking which has become a hot spot for confidential data seekers.
With Vanish, e-mails would be completely secure. What it does is to scramble your confidential email text into a string of nonsensical letters and numbers. It doesn't stop there. To make things worse for data sniffers, it encodes and splits the message into 10 pieces. These pieces are the hidden on, on 1.5 million randomly selected computers - part of a network of machines spread across more than 200 countries. This makes sniffing data from Vanish almost an impossible task.
Additionally, as users log off from the aforementioned network, the number of key fragments online decreases. On an average, by the end of eight hours, what is left of your e-mail is an unreadable pile of data that would be good for nothing. As of now, Vanish demands that both you and the recipient install the program on your systems and use Firefox. Once installed, just highlight your e-mail or chat message or a part of the communication you want to keep confidential and select "Create Vanish message" and send! At the same time, the other recipient gets an option to "Read Scrambled Message".
Of course, even Vanish isn't completely secure as the recipient can always copy the scrambled message and keep a copy for himself if he really wants to. Nevertheless, this is way better than the seemingly "open" ways in which we communicate nowadays.
Try Vanish free at http://vanish.cs.washington.edu.
During the previous generation of post offices, post-men and letters, even confidential stuff were "on paper" and you could get rid of them whenever you want. Paper shredders, anyone? Besides, you only needed to worry about the mail being read in transit by a curious postal employee; something you really won't mind unless it was something really crucial - like a password to your ATM card, with the card of course.
How secure do you think communication through e-mail is? Well, it is pretty secure. However, if you give it due thought and research, you will learn that whenever you send an e-mail, between the time you send it and it reaches the recipient, it has made a digital copy of itself on all the intermediate servers used for the transmission. So, what you now have is a copy of your mail in your sent box, one in the inbox of the recipient and God knows how many on all those intermediate servers. And if you really have some powers (say, you're the U.S. Government?) you can actually "sniff" stuff from these servers and have fun reading your mails. Oh and by the way, this is completely legal. The EU and U.S. are authorized to sniff into your e-mails should they feel you're some kinda threat. The worst part is, even after you delete your e-mail for peace of mind, it STILL is out there somewhere!
It is this very privacy issue that has given rise to the introduction of Vanish, a free program that is designed to erase all the digital footprints of your e-mail after a few hours. In short, it's nothing but an e-mail with an expiry date. You have some time to read it and after that, it would be unpalatable. That 'some time' is 8-hours as of now. If you're the one who sent the mail, you would want to save a backup somewhere. Because, after eight hours, even you wouldn't be able to read it. Vanish is developed by Roxana Geambasu and Professor Hank Levy of The University of Washington. Vanish was born after Levy pondered over the fact that in today's age, the digital world has forgotten to forget, as he puts it! Whatever you do online, remains there albeit in a scrambled form, until one fine day, someone painstakingly deduces an online persona of yours and find out something about you which you wouldn't really want others to know. This holds true not just in case of e-mails, but also for social networking which has become a hot spot for confidential data seekers.
With Vanish, e-mails would be completely secure. What it does is to scramble your confidential email text into a string of nonsensical letters and numbers. It doesn't stop there. To make things worse for data sniffers, it encodes and splits the message into 10 pieces. These pieces are the hidden on, on 1.5 million randomly selected computers - part of a network of machines spread across more than 200 countries. This makes sniffing data from Vanish almost an impossible task.
Additionally, as users log off from the aforementioned network, the number of key fragments online decreases. On an average, by the end of eight hours, what is left of your e-mail is an unreadable pile of data that would be good for nothing. As of now, Vanish demands that both you and the recipient install the program on your systems and use Firefox. Once installed, just highlight your e-mail or chat message or a part of the communication you want to keep confidential and select "Create Vanish message" and send! At the same time, the other recipient gets an option to "Read Scrambled Message".
Of course, even Vanish isn't completely secure as the recipient can always copy the scrambled message and keep a copy for himself if he really wants to. Nevertheless, this is way better than the seemingly "open" ways in which we communicate nowadays.
Try Vanish free at http://vanish.cs.washington.edu.
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