A Digital Asset Inheritance Model to Convey Online Persona Posthumously

The astounding growth of the Internet has generated digital asset extensively. Users are concerned about asset management so that the asset can be conveyed successfully to the descendent posthumously. Very few works have addressed designing and modeling of digital asset inheritance (DAI) from a technical design perspective. They have several inherent limitations such as incorrect death confirmation, high participation of nominee, the possibility of failure to obtain recovery key, and are based on many unreasonable assumptions, thus inefficient to design in the real life. In this paper, we have formalized the different categories of digital assets and defined the various security goals, required functionalities, and necessary entities to build an asset inheritance model. We have also proposed a new protocol named digital asset inheritance protocol (DAIP) using certificateless encryption (CLE) and identity-based system (IBS) to convey the user’s online persona efficiently to the descendent after his death. DAIP allows the nominee to successfully retrieve the asset after the user’s demise, even if a nominee is uninformed regarding the asset. We, then, provide rigorous security proofs of various properties using real–ideal worlds paradigm. Finally, we have implemented DAIP model using PBC and pycryptodome library. The simulation results affirm that it can be practically efficient to implement.