Information protection via environmental data tethers

Faced with an increasing number of incidents involving leaks of confidential data, it is clear that new data protection strategies are needed. We propose Data Tethers, a new paradigm which uses policies based on environmental factors to determine when sensitive data may be stored on a machine and when it must be encrypted or removed from the machine entirely. We discuss a number of example scenarios where existing data protection systems provide insufficient protection and Data Tethers would prevent data exposure. We also discuss a proposed implementation of Data Tethers, including a number of different environmental inputs.