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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

#961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money is required to decrypt a file encrypted with a 256-bit AES key?

How much person(s) who know the key will take to change country and don't work anymore? Or how much it is cost to kidnap significant one of key bearer(s)? I think, it is very reasonable sums for governments of almost any country.

I think you assume that encryption keys are held by people like a house key in their pocket. That's not the case for organizations who are security obsessed. They put their keys in HSMs. They practice defense in depth. They build least-privilege access controls.

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

#962

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTP can be useful especially for backups. Use a fast random number generator (real, not pseudo), write output to fill tape A. XOR the contents of tape A to your backup datastream and write result to Tape B. Store tape A and B in different locations.

But you have one copy of the key stream. It is not safe. You need at least two places to store at least two copies of the key stream. You cannot store it in non-friendly cloud (and this thread started from backing up government sensitive data into cloud owned by other country, possibly adversary one. If you have two physically separate places which you could trust key stream, you could use them to backup non-encrypte…

You may want some redundancy because needing both tapes increases the risk to your backup. You could just backup more often. You could use 4 locations, so you have redundand keystreams and redundant backup streams. But in general, storing the key stream follows the same necessities as storing the backup or some traditional encryption keys for a backup. But in general, your backup already is a redundancy, and you will usually do multiple backups in time intervals, so it really isn't that bad.

Btw, you really really need a fresh keystream for each and every backup. You will have as many keystream tapes as you have backup tapes. Re-using the OTP keystream enables a lot of attacks on OTP, e.g. by a simple chosen plaintext an attacker can get the keystream from the backup stream and then decrypt other backup streams with it. XORing similar backup streams also gives the attacker an idea which bits might have changed.

And there is a difference to storing things unencrypted in two locations: If an attacker, like some evil maid, steals a tape in one location, you just immediately destroy its corresponding tape in the other location. That way, the stolen tape will forever be useless to the attacker. Only an attacker that can steal a pair of corresponding tapes in both locations before the theft is noticed could get at the plaintext.

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

#963
post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hanlon's Razor is such an overused meme/trope that it's become meaningless. It's a fallacy to assume that malice is never a form of stupidity/folly. An evil person fails to understand what is truly good because of some kind of folly, e.g. refusing to internally acknowledge the evil consequences of evil actions. There is no clean evil-vs-stupid dichotomy. E.g. is a drunk driver who kill someone with drunk driving stup…

It's also true that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

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

#965

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lack a lot of polish. Functionally they're mostly usable, but some interactions are janky and I found the search to be super hit or miss.

> I found the search to be super hit or miss. I heard similar complaints from friends that came to visit. But they were using the English version of the apps, which, when I tested, were indeed harder to use, but never a miss for me when I helped them. OTOH, I always find my destinations within the first three options when I search in Korean. So maybe it's subpar internationlization. > They lack a lot of polish. [...]…

I used both English and Hangul to search. Searching for general things like food was good, but if I was trying to find a specific address it was very difficult. Sometimes it would just return completely wrong garbage. One time I was trying to meet up with someone and only realized halfway that the destination was wrong because Naver decided to take me somewhere else despite me copying the exact address in Hangul.

Maybe more about my unfamiliarity with the Korean address format than anything else tbh.

Some things about Naver I kind of miss from Apple/Google maps, but international software in general feels much more user friendly and better UX than Korean software.

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

#966

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While I understand what you're saying, you can extend this logic to such things as faster-than-light travel, over-unity devices, time travel etc. They're just "hard" math problems. No you can't. Those aren't hard math problems. They're Universe breaking assertions. This is not the problem of flight. They're not engineering problems. They're not, "perhaps in the future, we'll figure out..". Unless our understanding o…

According to our understanding of physics, which is based on our understanding of maths, the time taken to brute force a modern encryption standard, even with quantum computers, is longer than the expected life of the universe. The likely-hood of "finding a shortcut" to do this is in the same ball-park as "finding a shortcut" to tap into ZPE or "vacuum energy" or create worm-holes. The maths is understood, and no fut…

Sorry, I don't think this is true. There is basically no useful proven lower bound on the complexity of breaking popular cryptosystems. The math is absolutely not understood. In fact, it is one of the most poorly understood areas of mathematics. Consider that breaking any classical cryptosystem is in the complexity class NP, since if an oracle gives you the decryption key, you can break it quickly. Well we can't even prove that NP != P, i.e., that there even exists a problem where having such an oracle gives you a real advantage. Actually, we can't even prove that PSPACE != P, which should be way easier than proving NP != P if it's true.

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

#967

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Speaking specifically from the IT side of things, an employer or customer refusing to do backups is the biggest red flag I can get, an immediate warning to run the fuck away before you get blamed for their failure, stego-tech kind of situation. That being said, I can likely guess where this ends up going: * Current IT staff and management are almost certainly scapegoated for “allowing this to happen”, despite t…

There's a pretty big possibility it comes down to acquisition and cost saving from politicians in charge of the purse strings. I can all but guarantee that the systems administrators and even technical managers had suggested, recommended and all but begged for the resources for a redundant/backup system in a separate physical location were denied because it would double the expense. This isn't to preclude major ignor…

By definition if one department is given a hard veto, then there will always be a possibility that all the combined work of all other departments can amount to nothing, or even have a net negative impact.

The real question then is more fundamental.

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

#969
post #929

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It says that "most systems" in this data center are backed up to separate hardware on a different floor, and then a backup is made at a physically remote location. This particular G-Drive system was not on the standard backup process - it sounds like it was much higher volume than any others, so maybe they couldn't use it. They did have a pilot going to get G-Drive backed up...it was supposed to be scaled up to t…

From what I'm seeing that pilot is about NTOPS (National Total Operation Platform System) which they use to manage everything, and since this was on the floor above the fire it made recovery a lot more complicated There's a high chance i'm missing something though, where did you read about a G-Drive backup system?

G-Drive is the name of their bespoke file storage system that was taken down by the fire.

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

#970
post #604

Real reason is humans are way too optimistic in planning and, for some reason, tend to overlook even more rare, but catastrophic risks. I’m almost sure that the system had some sort of local replication and versioning that was enough to deal with occasional deletions, rollbacks, and single non-widespread hardware failures, so only the very catastrophic scenario of losing all servers at the same time (that for sure wo…

At a previous job I was not allowed to do disaster planning with customers, after I told one of them that it was entirely possible to take out both our datacenters with one plane crash. The two locations where a "safe" distance apart, but where also located fairly close the approach of an airport, and a crashing passenger jet is big enough to take out both buildings. Apparently I plan for the rather rare catastrophes…

However it's also possible that an asteroid could destroy everything or a nuclear war.
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