Vanish – A Self Destructing Public Encryption System

Vanish, announced by researchers at the University of Washington today, is a new concept for sending protected messages over the internet.  It is not a shared key system, meaning that you dont have to exchange anything with someone beforehand in order to send them a protected message.  The concept is that the message is encrypted by a key, which is scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing network and is unknown even to the sender.  After a specific amount of time, the key will erode away from the peer-to-peer network, off of several different nodes, making it more difficult if not impossible to ever reassemble the key that was used to protect the data.  Vanish is a perfect digital equivelent to disappering ink.  You can send someone a message and encrypt it with a self destructing key, which makes it mathematically “impossible” to read without.  The University of Washington has a FireFox plugin you can use to test out this new system here.