Humour

How to Mist-ify your mail

T A Balasubramanian on making emails disappear after a specific period of time, for security reasons

Here we are, once more, at the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE), the unconventional IT trade convention. As usual, you, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, are in the company of Danny DeVito, your CTO and associate—who, is, incidentally, a biped humanoid.

“Oh, there you are, again,” says a booming voice. You turn to find Gene Hackman, CEO of Virus Busters, forwarding his hand in greeting to you, and then to DeVito.

“Well, now, Gene,” says DeVito, beaming at his Hollywood-styled friend. “You must be up to something crazy that we techies can sink our teeth into?”

“You are absolutely right, Danny. We do have a breakthrough that should make any geek delirious,” says Hackman, with a chuckle. “But before I present my dazzler, let me give you a preamble. You know, of course that with all this blooming global digital connectivity, there are formidable challenges to the little-mentioned matter of data privacy. I’m talking of your personal data.”

“Ah, yes, personal data,” you sigh. “Anything that you enter into a computer network tends to last for a very long time. Sometimes going into places that it was not intended to travel to.”

“Very well put, Papyrus. There are two ways that this unintended travel can happen. First, my increasing reliance on Web services causes my personal data to be cached, copied, and archived by third parties, often without my knowledge or control. Second, the disclosure of my private data has become commonplace due to my own carelessness, or by theft, or even legal actions.”

“Oh, dear. So we are exposed to the world in ways that we cannot even imagine,” says DeVito, glumly.

“But not to worry, Danny. Our research has produced an answer. You can actually protect the privacy of your past, archived data—such as copies of emails maintained by your diligent Web service provider—against accidental, malicious, or legal attacks. You would know, of course, that good old public key cryptography makes it possible for two parties who have never physically met to share a digital secret and as a result engage in a secure electronic conversation sheltered from potential eavesdroppers. The technology is at the heart of most modern electronic commerce systems.”

“Are you saying you have an unbreakable encryption code? Something that no hacker can break?”

“Exactly the opposite. It is something broken so finely that no hacker can put it back together. We have discovered a way to transform all your data into e-mist.”

“And what is e-mist?”

“Ah, now that brings me to our new product, Mistify. It is a magical software that allows you to exchange personal messages with someone in the usual way, except that the contents you send out are designed to vanish after a limited period of time, as they become unreadable afterwards. In short, Mistify turns your precious e-mail into e-mist.”

“But what if a determined hacker obtains a copy of that data and the original cryptographic keys and passwords?” you ask.

“Ah, even that diabolical plot is easily subverted by Mistify, Papyrus. As you know, the idea of making digital data disappear after a specified period of time is not new. Many services that perform this trick exist. Some devices like memory chips can automatically wipe your data out after a specified period of time. But we do it differently—we spray the encryption key into a fine ‘mist’ by scattering it widely, so that is held by neither party in an e-mail exchange.”

“In effect, making the data self-destruct after a while? I suppose that it would have specific uses in some exchanges of a delicate nature, eh?”

“Yes, of course. Mistify is best used for messages meant to be read once, processed, and then forgotten about forever. As your messages eventually become unrecoverable, they aren’t meant to be used for archival purposes. For example, imagine that you send an e-mail to Papyrus discussing a sensitive topic, such as the odd actions of an unruly employee at Baffle, the possibility of having him fired, or how to ward off a spurious lawsuit. This e-mail has no value as soon as Papyrus reads it, and you, of course, would like that all copies of this e-mail—regardless of where it is stored or cached—be automatically shredded after a certain period of time, rather than risk exposure in the future as part of a data breach, or a legal action. In fact, both of you would actually prefer that these emails disappear early—and not be read by some curious system administrator, right?”

“I certainly would,” you say, wryly.

“It sounds good, Gene,” says DeVito, beaming. “Send it, read it and forget it? James Bond would have loved Mistify.”

“That’s right, Danny. You nailed it! As yet another example, from a data sanitation point of view, maybe you would could benefit from self-destructing trash bins on your desktop or notebook, eh?”

“I certainly could,” says Danny, smirking.

“With Mistify, those tell-tale trash bins would preserve deleted files for a certain period of time, but after a timeout the files would self-destruct, becoming unavailable even to a James Bond villain. All this would happen without the use of any explicit delete action by you, or the parties storing that data. And without the need for you to modify any of the stored or archived copies of that data.”

“That is indeed impressive, Gene. You deserve a special position in the intelligence services.”

“Thank you, Danny,” says Hackman, bowing with a grin. “We also serve, who stand by and delete.”