All-Or-Nothing data protection for ubiquitous communication: Challenges and perspectives

As we are in the age of ubiquitous computing and communication, the need to provide safety and security for such systems is more urgent than ever. Research works of cryptography methods aim to protect the data in the ubiquitous computing and communication systems by encryption. However, more and more recent incidents threatening data security have shown that sole encryption schemes cannot meet the safety needs in today's complicated ubiquitous computing systems. Thus, the topic of providing additional protection such as All-Or-Nothing (AON) data protection scheme has drawn interest from a large number of researchers and practitioners. Many data protection methods based on this AON data protection concepts are developed aiming to enhance the classical encryption schemes. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we collate research works across a number of topics in AON, from historical developments to the recent research proposal. By introducing new definitions and category methods, we hope to provide useful reference and perspectives for the state of AON research and development.