Abstract: Self-destructing data mainly aims at protecting the user data's privacy. Personal data stored in the Cloud may contain account numbers, passwords, notes, and other important information. These data are cached, copied, and archived by Cloud Service Providers, often without users authorization and control. All the data and their copies become destructed or unreadable after a user-specified time, without any user intervention. In addition, the decryption key is destructed after the user-specified time. In this paper, we present SeDas, a system that meets this challenge through a novel integration of symmetric key techniques with active storage techniques by successfully deleting even if the server goes down. Compared to the system without self-destructing data mechanism, throughput for uploading and downloading with the proposed SeDas acceptably decreases by less than 72%, while latency for upload/download operations with self-destructing data mechanism increases by less than 60%.

Keywords: Active storage, Cloud computing, Self destruction data system.