741–750 of 987 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not?
Because it lowers the threshold for a total informational compromise attack from "exfiltrate 34PB of data from secure govt infrastructure" down to "exfiltrate 100KB of key material". You can get that out over a few days just by pulsing any LED visible from outside an air-gapped facility.
"The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets" Just so we can all visualise this in an understandable way, if laid end-to-end how many times round the world would the A4 sheets go? And what is their total area in football fields?
UPDATE: as sibling pointed out indirectly, it's eight thousand Popocatépetls [0].
[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28thic...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Laws of physics hasn't changed since the early 00s though, we could build very low latency point to point links back then too.
Plus long distance was mostly fibre already. And even regular electrical wires aren’t really much slower than fibre in term of latency. Parent probably meant bandwidth.
What used to happen (and still does as far as I know, but I've been out of the networking game for a while now) is you'd get fibre laid between yourself and your ISP. So you're then subject to the latency of their networking stack. And that becomes a huge problem if you want to do any real-time work like DB replicas.
The only way to do automated off-site backups was via overnight snapshots. And you're then running into the bandwidth constraints of the era.
What most businesses ended up doing was tape backups and then physically driving it to another site -- ideally then storing it an fireproof safe. Only the largest companies could afford to push it over fibre.
"The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets" Just so we can all visualise this in an understandable way, if laid end-to-end how many times round the world would the A4 sheets go? And what is their total area in football fields?
Placed in a grid, they'd cover an area larger than Wales [2].
Piled on top of each other, they'd reach a tenth the distance to the moon [3].
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[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28leng...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28area...
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28thic...
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As someone who’s fairly tech-literate but has a big blind spot in cryptography, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for articles, blog posts, or smaller books on the topic! My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable. You sound both very knowledgeable on the topic, and very confident in the safety of modern encrypt…
> My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable Lol this is woefully misinformed.
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It feels like you are being obtuse/arguing in bad faith. Of course there are standards on backups. Most countries have them. Let's think what regulations does the 'free market' bastion US have on computer systems and data storage... HIPAA, PCI DSS, CIS, SOC, FIPS, FINRA...
> HIPAA, PCI DSS, CIS, SOC, FIPS, FINRA Those are related to _someone else's_ data handling.
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…
there are many failure points here, not paying Amazon/Google/Microsoft is hardly the main point.
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Government isn’t perfect but I’d be interested to know what alternative you propose?
a) Incarceration time for IT execs and responsible engineers. b) Let companies go out of business once they fail to protect their own crucial data. None of that is possible.
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Why not?
As of today, there's no way to prove the security of any available cryptosystem. Let me say that differently: for all we know, ALL currently available cryptosystems can be easily cracked by some unpublished techniques. The only sort-of exception to that requires quantum communication, which is nowhere near practicability on the scale required. The only evidence we have that the cryptography that we commonly use is ac…
The current state of encryption is based on math problems many levels harder than the ones that existed a few decades ago. Most vulnerabilities have been due to implementation bugs, and not actual math bugs. Probably the highest profile "actual math" bug is the DUAL_EC_DRBG weakness which was (almost certainly) deliberately inserted by the NSA, and triggered a wave of distrust in not just NIST, but any committee designed encryption standards. This is why people prefer to trust DJB than NIST.
There are enough qualified eyes on most modern open encryption standards that I'd trust them to be as strong as any other assumptions we base huge infrastructure on. Tensile strengths of materials, force of gravity, resistance and heat output of conductive materials, etc, etc.
The material risk to South Korea was almost certainly orders of magnitude greater by not having encrypted backups, than by having encrypted backups, no matter where they were stored (as long as they weren't in the same physical location, obviously).
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Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. There was that time when some high profile company's entire Google Cloud account was destroyed. Backups were on Google Cloud too. No off-site backups.
> Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity. I don't think there's anything that can't be attributed to stupidity, so the statement is pointless. Besides, it doesn't really matter naming an action stupidity, when the consequences are indistinguishable from that of malice.