Ensuring data confidentiality via plausibly deniable encryption and secure deletion – a survey

Abstract

Ensuring confidentiality of sensitive data is of paramount importance, since data leakage may not only endanger data owners’ privacy, but also ruin reputation of businesses as well as violate various regulations like HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley Act. To provide confidentiality guarantee, the data should be protected when they are preserved in the personal computing devices (i.e., confidentiality during their lifetime); and also, they should be rendered irrecoverable after they are removed from the devices (i.e., confidentiality after their lifetime). Encryption and secure deletion are used to ensure data confidentiality during and after their lifetime, respectively. This work aims to perform a thorough literature review on the techniques being used to protect confidentiality of the data in personal computing devices, including both encryption and secure deletion. Especially for encryption, we mainly focus on the novel plausibly deniable encryption (PDE), which can ensure data confidentiality against both a coercive (i.e., the attacker can coerce the data owner for the decryption key) and a non-coercive attacker.