A User Model for Information Erasure. Tedesco, F. D. & Sands, D. In SecCo'09, 7th International Workshop on Security Issues in Concurrency, of Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, 2009. To appear
A User Model for Information Erasure [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Hunt and Sands (ESOP'08) studied a notion of \emphinformation erasure for systems which receive secrets intended for limited-time use. Erasure demands that once a secret has fulfilled its purpose the subsequent behaviour of the system should reveal no information about the erased data. In this paper we address a shortcoming in that work: for erasure to be possible the user who provides data must also play his part, but previously that role was only specified informally. Here we provide a formal model of the user and a collection of requirements called \empherasure friendliness. We prove that an erasure-friendly user can be composed with an erasing system (in the sense of Hunt and Sands) to obtain a combined system which is \emphjointly erasing in an appropriate sense. In doing so we identify stronger requirements on the user than those informally described in the previous work.

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