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Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

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Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#201

Post by dboreham »

otterley wrote: post #185
littlestymaar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information They were still right though: it's absolutely clear without an ounce of doubt that whatever you put on an US cloud is being accessible by the US government, who can also decide to sanction you and deprive you from your ability to access the data yourself. Not having backups is entirely retard…

The U.S. Government can’t decrypt data for which it does not possess the key (assuming the encryption used is good).

In theory. I'm very much happier to have my encrypted data also not be available to adversaries.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#202

Post by hinkley »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #160
eCa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree completely that it's absolute wild to run such a system without backups. But at this point no government should keep critical data on foreign cloud storage.

And yet here is an example where keeping critical data off public cloud storage has been significantly worse for them in the short term. Not that they should just go all in on it, but an encrypted copy on S3 or GCS would seem really useful right about now.

We’ve had Byzantine crypto key solutions since at least 2007 when I was evaluating one for code signing for commercial airplanes. You could put an access key on k:n smart cards, so that you could extract it from one piece of hardware to put on another, or you could put the actual key on the cards so burning down the data center only lost you the key if you locked half the card holders in before setting it on fire.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#203

Post by CoastalCoder »

pico303 wrote: post #150
kristianc wrote: post #95

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

What a lame excuse. “The G-Drive’s structure did not allow for backups” is a blatant lie. It’s code for, “I don’t value other employees’ time and efforts enough to figure out a reliable backup system; I have better things to do.” Whoever made this excuse should be demoted to a journeyman ops engineer. Firing would be too good for them.

You could be right, but it could also be a bad summary or bad translation.

We shouldn't rush to judgement.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#205

Post by t-3 »

crazygringo wrote: post #166
stogot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? If the region is in country, encrypted, and with proven security attestations validated by third parties, a backup to a cloud storage would be incredibly wise. Otherwise we might end up reading an article about a fire burning down a single data center

Exactly. Like, don't store it in the cloud of an enemy country of course. But if it's encrypted and you're keeping a live backup in a second country with a second company, ideally with a different geopolitical alignment, I don't see the problem.

From the perspective of securing your data, what's the practical difference between a second country and an enemy country? None. Even if it's encrypted data, all encryption can be broken, and so we must assume it will be broken. Sensitive data shouldn't touch outside systems, period, no matter what encryption.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#209

Post by bink »

shakna wrote: post #186
stogot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? If the region is in country, encrypted, and with proven security attestations validated by third parties, a backup to a cloud storage would be incredibly wise. Otherwise we might end up reading an article about a fire burning down a single data center

Microsoft has already testified that the American government maintains access to their data centres, in all regions. It likely applies to all American cloud companies. America is not a stable ally, and has a history of spying on friends. So unless the whole of your backup is encrypted offline, and you trust the NSA to never break the encryption you chose, its a national security risk.

Not only does the NSA break encryption but they actually sabotage algorithms to make them easier to break when used.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#210

Post by Johnny555 »

whatevaa wrote: post #121
miken123 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because these companies never lose data, like during some lightning strikes, oh wait: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33989384 As a government you should not be putting your stuff in an environment under control of some other nation, period. That is a completely different issue and does not really relate to making backups.

Yeah, I heard that consumer clouds are only locally redundant and there aren't even backups. So big DC damage could result in data loss.

By default, Amazon S3 stores data across at least separate datacenters that are in the same region, but are physically separate from each other:

Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive redundantly store objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones in an AWS Region. An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. Availability Zones are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other Availability Zone, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other.

You can save a little money by giving up that redundancy and having your data i a single AZ:

The S3 One Zone-IA storage class stores data redundantly across multiple devices within a single Availability Zone

For further redundancy you can set up replication to another region, but if I needed that level of redundancy, I'd probably store another copy of data with a different cloud provider so an AWS global failure (or more likely, a billing issue) doesn't leave my data trapped in one vendor).

I believe Google and Azure have similar levels of redundancy levels in their cloud storage.

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