Universities Spar Over Disappearing Electronic Messages

In less than two months after a group of University of Washington computer researchers proposed a novel system for making electronic messages “disappear” after a certain period of time, a rival group of researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, has claimed to have undermined the scheme.

In July, the University of Washington team described an experimental system called “Vanish” predicated on the idea of scattering the parts of an encryption key on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file sharing network in such a way that the key–a large number–would become unusable as pieces of it were lost from the network.

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