Beyond Life: A Digital Will Solution for Posthumous Data Management

2025-01-09

AI Summary

In the digital era, managing and controllably distributing deceased individuals’ digital assets faces critical challenges: inflexible access control, poor cross-platform interoperability, reliance on centralized service providers, and insufficient cryptographic transparency. To address these, we propose PD-CP-ABE—the first Policy-Driven Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption scheme tailored for digital wills—enabling fine-grained, scalable, and policy-driven ciphertext access control. We further design an open-source, service-agnostic, end-to-end encrypted cross-platform testamentary system that empowers users with full autonomy over management, portability, and decentralized execution. Empirical evaluation demonstrates strong security guarantees, low latency, and practical feasibility in real-world scenarios, supporting multi-platform deployment and efficient management of policy sets scaling to ten thousand entries.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems

Abstract

In the digital era, managing posthumous data presents a growing challenge, with current technical solutions often falling short in practicality. Existing tools are typically closed-source, lack transparency, fail to offer cross-platform support, and provide limited access control. This paper introduces `Beyond Life', a cross-platform digital will management solution designed to securely handle and distribute digital assets after death. At the core of this solution is a customized Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) scheme, referred to as PD-CP-ABE, which enables efficient, fine-grained control over access to will content at scale. Unlike existing systems, Beyond Life operates independently of service providers, offering users greater transparency and control over how their will is generated, stored, and executed. The system is also designed to be portable, allowing users to change their will service provider. The proposed system has been fully developed and rigorously evaluated to ensure performance and real-world feasibility. The system implementation is made publicly available.

Problem

• Digital Legacy Management
• Transparency in Source Code
• Cross-Device Compatibility

Innovation

• PD-CP-ABE Encryption
• Cross-Platform Digital Will Management
• Transparency and Migratability