Josh Muir - Securing Digital Legacies - March 2024.

Securing Digital Legacies

This repository contains the source code for the application I wrote for my Senior Honours Dissertation which I completed at the University of St Andrews in 2023-2024. It communicates with a "cloud provider" backup server which I am keeping closed source at present. I hope to clean things up and make it a bit more usable.

For the full technical details and rationale for this project, see my dissertation.

Abstract

Digital legacy and what happens to our data after death are becoming a growing concern. This project examines the current state of the art and law surrounding this topic from a privacy perspective and proposes a new solution to pass on digital assets using a digital vault. A digital vault contains data and can be shared with a number of recipients through a threshold secret sharing scheme, where some recipients must cooperate to access the data. The project includes a user study to evaluate the project's success and identify areas for future work. I found that the majority of users found the application easy to use and would use a similar application to manage their digital legacy in the future. This shows the growing need for a legacy solution suited to the digital age that is platform-independent, secure and privacy focused.

Building

All required dependencies are installed on lab machines.

npm install
npm run tauri build

The output can then be found in application/src-tauri/target/relase.

Dependencies for Arch are:

• Rust 1.73.0 or later.
• webkit2gtk4.0-devel
• openssl-devel
• curl
• wget
• file
• libappindicator-gtk3-devel
• librsvg2-devel
• C Development Tools and Libraries

File overview

This overview will focus on the more key/interesting files.

• public/ - Contains assets used outside the main application. The loading screen and loading icon are there.
• src/ - Contains the React and Typescript code for the frontend/user interface.
  • assets/ Contains static assets used such as sass for styling and fonts.
  • pages/ Contains the main page flow components.
    • welcome.tsx The home page that has buttons to navigate to Creation/open/unlock.
    • creation/ Contains React components for vault creation and updates.
    • open/ Contains React components to open a vault using the main key.
    • unlock/ Contains React components to unlock a vault using key pieces.
  • shared/ Contains components used in multiple pages or locations, i.e. Headers, error handlers and the progress indicator.
  • util/ Contains utility functions - no components.
  • app.tsx Main mount point for the application.
• src-tauri/ Contains the Rust logic and core commands used to manage vaults
  • tauri.conf.json Contains configuration for Tauri such as enabled features, application name etc.
  • icons/ Contains app icons. The blob used is randomly generated.
  • src/ Contains Rust code
    • commands/ Contains the commands - Which are hooks that can be called from the frontend to run rust code.
    • crypto.rs Handles all of the cryptography including key splitting, key generation etc.
    • vault.rs Contains types/structs for the vault and its various fields.