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.
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.
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
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.
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.
kazinator|4 months ago
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|4 months ago
AshamedCaptain|4 months ago
lucb1e|4 months ago
> ... 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
zhouzhao|4 months ago
kspacewalk2|4 months ago
mikehotel|4 months ago
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.
icedchai|4 months ago