Distinguished Seminar Series

Title: Data: Making it be there when you want it, and making it disappear when you want it gone

Abstract: This talk describes a design that provides data storage with high availability, protection against unauthorized disclosure, and the ability to create data with an expiration date, such that after the expiration date it is unreadable, even if backups of the data still exist. The obvious approach, of course, is to encrypt the data, and then destroy keys at the appropriate times. But that still leaves the problem of managing the keys. To ensure availability before expiration, the keys must be backed up in multiple places, but if there are enough backup copies of the keys to assure availability of unexpired keys, it will be difficult to assure that backups with unexpired keys are all destroyed. This talk presents a design that simultaneously solves both problems; it allows making arbitrarily many copies of all of the state of the file system (for high availability), and yet, once data expires it is impossible to recover, even though an old backup can still be found. This design is simple, easy to manage, and has minimal performance overhead.

 Bio:  Radia Perlman is a Fellow at Intel Labs, specializing on network protocols and security protocols.  Many of the technologies she designed have been deployed in the Internet for decades, including the IS-IS routing protocol, and the spanning tree algorithm that has been the heart of Ethernet.  More recently she invented the concept of TRILL, which improves upon spanning tree while still “being Ethernet”.  She has also made contributions to network security, including assured delete of data, design of the authentication handshake of IPSec (IKEv2), trust models for PKI, and network infrastructure robust against malicious trusted components.  She is the author of the textbook “Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols”, and coauthor of “Network Security”. She has a PhD from MIT in computer science, and has received various industry awards including lifetime achievement awards from ACM’s SIGCOMM and Usenix, and an honorary doctorate from KTH.