Is there any way to track if a ciphertext has been decypted? Just like the case of a box that has been sealed. We can detect if the box has been opened or not by looking at the seal. Is there any way in cryptography or any encryption scheme that allows this to happen? If we have a ciphertext, I wonder if there is a mechanism that can detect if someone has decrypted it?
Digital data can always be copied. So it is easy to see that such a seal would not work in general: you could just leave the original ciphertext where it is and decrypt the copy.

There are ways around this, but they need some other trusted party or device. For instance you could use a simple secret sharing technique where (information from) a trusted third party is needed to reconstruct the decryption key. Or the trusted third party could do the decryption themselves, but in that case they may learn the plaintext. There are also plenty of techniques where the trusted third party never knows the plaintext.

Obviously you don't know the other party actually learns the plaintext. It could perform the digital equivalent of looking away. You can just learn if they received the plaintext and had the opportunity to see it. It would be easy to require the other party to sign the plaintext to verify that information was received.



You can of course generate the digital variant of a sealed box in hardware. This lets you get around the fact that the ciphertext can be easily copied.