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Comment by zwnow

9 days ago

Rightfully did not trust these companies. Sure what happened is a disaster for them, but you cant simply trust Amazon & Microsoft.

24 comments

zwnow

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kingnothing  9 days ago

Why not? You can easily encrypt your data before sending it for storage on on S3, for example.

  • kazinator  9 days ago

    You and I can encrypt our data before saving it into the cloud, because we have nothing of value or interest to someone with the resources of a state.

    Sometimes sensitive data at the government level has a pretty long shelf life; you may want it to remain secret in 30, 50, 70 years.

    • waterTanuki  9 days ago

      I don't see how this is any different than countries putting significant portions of their gold & currency reserves in the NY Federal Reserve Bank. If for some reason the U.S. just decided to declare "Your monies are all mine now" the effects would be equally if not more devastating than a data breach.

      3 replies →

  • AshamedCaptain  9 days ago

    Is encryption, almost any form, really reliable protection for a countries' government entire data? I mean, this is _the_ ultimate playground for "state level actors" -- if someday there's a hole and it turns out it takes only 20 years to decrypt the data with a country-sized supercomputer, you can bet _this_ is what multiple alien countries will try to decrypt first.

    • lucb1e  9 days ago

      You're assuming that this needs to protect...

      > ... a countries' government entire data?

      But the bulk of the data is "boring": important to individuals, but not state security ("sorry Jiyeong, the computer doesn't know if you are a government employee. Apologies if you have rent to make this month!")

      There likely exists data where the risk calculation ends up differently, so that you wouldn't store it in this system. For example, for nuke launch codes, they might rather lose than loose them. Better to risk having to reset and re-arm them than to have them hijacked

      > Is encryption, [in?] any form, really reliable protection

      There's always residual risk. E.g.: can you guarantee that every set of guards that you have watching national datacenters is immune from being bribed?

      Copying data around on your own territory thus also carries risks, but you cannot get around it if you want backups for (parts of) the data

      People in this thread are discussing specific cryptographic primitives that they think are trustworthy, which I think goes a bit deeper than makes sense here. Readily evident is that there are ciphers trusted by different governments around the world for their communication and storage, and that you can layer them such that all need to be broken before arriving at the plain, original data. There is also evidence in the Snowden archives that (iirc) e.g. PGP could not be broken by the NSA at the time. Several ciphers held up for the last 25+ years and are not expected to be broken by quantum computers either. All of these sources can be drawn upon to arrive at a solid choice for an encryption scheme

      3 replies →

  • zhouzhao  9 days ago

    You can encrypt them at rest, but data that lies encrypted and is never touched, is useless data. You need to decrypt them as well. Also, plenty of incompetent devops around, and writing a decryption toolchain can be difficult.

    • kspacewalk2  9 days ago

      Am I missing something? If you ever need to use this data, obviously you transfer it back to your premises and then decrypt it. Whether it's stored at Amazon or North Korean Government Cloud makes no difference whatsoever if you encrypt before and decrypt after transfer.

      4 replies →

    • mikehotel  9 days ago

      Decryption is not usually an issue if you encrypt locally.

      Tools like Kopia, Borg and Restic handle this and also include deduplication and other advanced features.

      Really no excuse for large orgs or even small businesses and somewhat tech literate public.

politelemon  9 days ago

S3 features have saved our bacon a number of times. Perhaps your experience and usage is different. They are worth trusting with business critical data as long as you're following their guidance. GCP though have not proven it, their data loss news is still fresh in my mind.

  • hosh  9 days ago

    Were you talking about this incidence? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden...

    I am currently evaluating between GCP and AWS right now.

    • Imustaskforhelp  9 days ago

      I read the article and it seems that, that thing happened because their account got deleted and here is something from the article you linked

      Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution).

      If you are working with really important software, please follow the 3-2-1 EVEN with cloud providers I suppose if you genuinely want ABSOLUTE guarantee I suppose, but it depends on how important the data is I suppose for the prices.

      I have thought about using some cheap like backblaze and wasabi and others for the 3-2-1 for backups I suppose I am not sure but I do think that this incident was definitely a bit interesting to read into and I will read more about it, I do remember it from kevin fang's video but this article is seriously good and I will read it later, bookmarked.