A Dream Come True: Deletable Content in Immutable Storage

This work introduces a novel construct we call dream that enables deletable content in otherwise immutable, decentralised storage systems such as Swarm. As an equitable and feasible response to the challenge of data destruction, our solution reconciles the inherent persistence of content-addressed storage with the practical needs, user preferences, and legal requirements of permanent revocation of access. The article contributes a new deletion model based on access revocation, and presents a mechanism that allows data-sharing users to grant—and later rescind—access to specific data for specific consumers. The solution leverages Swarm’s distributed storage architecture to introduce a procedural way to retrieve decryption keys, realised through a network protocol. The resulting system achieves the desired properties of deniability, revocability, expirability, addressability, and malleability without requiring trusted intermediaries or complex cryptographic primitives. The approach preserves the censorship resistance of decentralised systems allowing for sovereign control over data access by the original uploader, but not by any other party, thus avoiding re-centralisation in order to achieve deletion. Security analysis shows that revocation remains effective even under pervasive adversarial control.