University of Washington

Roxana Geambasu

Henry M Levy

Tadayoshi Kohno

Steven Gribble

Systems and methods for providing an auditing file system for theft-prone devices are disclosed. The auditing file system supports fine-grained file auditing: a user may obtain reliable, explicit evidence that no files have been accessed after a device's loss. A user may also disable future file access after a device's loss, even in the absence of device network connectivity. In one embodiment, files are encrypted locally but the encryption keys are stored remotely, so that an audit server is queried for encryption keys to access protected files. By configuring the audit server to refuse to return a particular file's key, the user can prevent new accesses after the device is lost.

Systems and methods for file access auditing

A configuration for encapsulating data that is unreadable after a predetermined timeout. To encapsulate data a random data key is generated and split into shares. A threshold number of shares are needed to reconstruct the key. The shares are stored at random locations within one or more networks. Each location is configured to delete the stored data after a predetermined time period. Encapsulated data is created by creating a vanishing data object (VDO) comprising the encrypted data, and data sufficient to locate at least a threshold number of key shares from their stored locations. The VDO becomes inaccessible after enough shares of the data are deleted such that the data key cannot be restored. However, if prior to timeout a sufficient number of data key shares are located and retrieved the data key can be reconstructed. The reconstructed data key is then used to decrypt the original data.

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New York, NY, United States of America

Roxana Geambasu