Last month I posted a story titled ‘Vanish’ Makes Sensitive Data Self-Destruct. It’s about a piece of software called ‘Vanish‘, developed by computer scientists at the University of Washington, which makes sensitive electronic messages ’self destruct’ after a certain period of time.

Now a group from researchers from UT Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan has come up with a way to break this approach, by making a single computer appear to be many nodes on the peer-to-peer network. In their experiments with the demonstration system (called Unvanish), they showed that it is possible to make Vanish messages reappear long after they should have disappeared nearly 100 percent of the time.

On Monday, the Vanish researchers responded that they had now modified their initial prototype to use multiple file sharing networks, complicating the task of an attacker. I dare say this will not be the end of this matter. It will only get more intense and interesting in the cat-and-mouse game of cryptography one-up-manship.