Methods of Isolation for Application Traces Using Virtual Machines and Shadow Copies

Abstract—To improve the user's experience, almost all applications save usage data: web browsers save history and cookies, chat programs save message archives and so on. However, this data can be confidential and may compromise the user's privacy. There are third party solutions to automatically detect and wipe these traces, but they have two problems: they need a constantly updated database of files to target, and they wipe the data after it has been written to the disk. Our proposed solution does not need a database and it automatically reverts the application to its initial (clean) state, leaving no traces behind. This is done by using a monitoring process developed by us and the Volume Shadow Copy Service that takes snapshots when the application runs and restores them at the end of the run. Keywords—security; privacy; application traces; data wiping; virtual machines; shadow copies; sandbox I