Enhancing Data Security by Making Data Disappear in a P2p System

Abstract

This thesis describes the problem of securing data by making it disappear after some time limit, making it impossible for it to be recovered by an unauthorized party. This method is in response to the need to keep the data secured and to protect the privacy of archived data on the servers, Cloud and Peer-to-Peer architectures. Due to the distributed nature of these architectures, it is impossible to destroy the data completely. So, we store the data by applying encryption and then manage the key. It is easy to handle the key rather than the data itself, as the key is small and it can be hidden in places where no one can trace it. This research helps in protecting the privacy of the data without deleting the original data, instead making the keys disappear in the DHT (Distributed hash table). Even if the keys in the DHT and the encrypted data were compromised, the data would still be secure. This thesis describes existing solutions, points to their limitations and suggests improvements with a new secure architecture. We evaluated and executed this architecture on the Java platform and proved that it is more secure than other architectures.