Plausibly Deniable Data Security the PDDB

Helping users keep secrets is a fundamental goal of Safe Network, and there have been some discussions of the need to protect data when users are being coerced. AFAIK this hasn’t gone much beyond the idea of decoy accounts, so I think it deserves its own topic.

The following blog post seems a good way to kick it off because it explains why it is needed, the problems to be addressed and how to solve them. Example:

Thus, assuming the ultimate goal of security is to protect the safety of users as human beings, and not just their files, enhanced security should come hand-in-hand with enhanced plausible deniability (PD). PD arms users with a set of tools they can use to navigate the social landscape of security, by making it difficult to enumerate all the secrets potentially contained within a device, even with deep forensic analysis.

The article covers the use case where an attacker has full access to a device and describes how to hide the existence of secrets (not just encrypt them) using a Plausible Deniability Database (PDDB). I think Safe can do much better than this because the amount of data to be hidden (on a device) could be much smaller than the amount stored (on Safe). It could be that a hybrid using PDDB integrated with Safe gives the same or better protection (Deniability) with better performance.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307

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