Security In the Ether 93
theodp writes "Technology Review's David Talbot says IT's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud — and prove we can trust it. 'The focus of IT innovation has shifted from hardware to software applications,' says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. 'Many of these applications are going on at a blistering pace, and cloud computing is going to be a great facilitative technology for a lot of these people.' But there's one little catch. 'None of this can happen unless cloud services are kept secure,' notes Talbot. 'And they are not.' Fully ensuring the security of cloud computing, says Talbot, will inevitably fall to emerging encryption technologies."
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Thank you (Score:1)
I make spelling errors despite my good intentions.
But my basic attitude is, that if you don't care about what you're saying enough to spell it, then don't write it. There are plenty of insightful people, who will write readable text.
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Cloud is a bit like "Smurf". It means whatever the speaker or listener wants it to mean.
Re:Emerging encryption tec (Score:4, Funny)
Full homeomorphic encryption is, contrary to IBMs press team, still far from useable. In fact, there is no method in sight that could do the job.
What you Linux lovers really want is full homoerotic encryption. So you can hide your gay porn.
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In light of these developments hardly a year since craig first released his results i see reason to hope
Whom are we securing it from? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example: all but the largest will be outsourcing their data centers. And when they outsource that storage will they find the same sort of pricing structures, perhaps on a different scale, that everybody else does - it is attractive, from a price perspective, to off-shore that data to places where it's just cheaper to run. One of the strengths of the Internet is how it shrinks the planet in that regard. But there has recently been a big debate about whether or not the 4th Amendment in the U.S. protects hosted e-mail from search and seizure by the U.S. government. What does the 4th Amendment in Malaysia protect against?
What if your biggest competitor in your particular industry is a Chinese company and your Cloud provider decides to store your data on a server located in China. Do you suppose the Chinese gov't might be able to access (or monitor) your data and provide any of it to their company?
Even if your data stays on a domestic server and your business is entirely legitimate - most Cloud providers are multi-tenant (that's the economy of scale that helps them keep prices down). What if one of the other tenants on that server is doing something naughty and the government decides to seize the server to go after them. Will your data be safe and protected? They're the government, right? OF COURSE your data will be handled properly.
Another big topic is document retention. You want to keep documents as long as you need to and then expire those documents. Will your SaaS/Cloud provider respect your document retention policies? Or are you going to discover, hopefully not after being served with a discovery request, that they actually have copies of your expired documents in cache or on backups somewhere that they never destroyed?
There are a LOT of new security issues that come up when you essentially put your data at arm's length with no real idea of where it's physically stored or who has access to those servers. I'll close with a quote:
"If (CIO) Randy Mott told me 'Put the general ledger up in the Cloud' I'd say 'Go back to work, we're not doing that."
-Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett Packard-
Re:Whom are we securing it from? (Score:4, Interesting)
in other words, encrypt, encrypt encrypt.
i am really considering printing public key barcodes on business cards, and refuse to accept mails that are not encrypted...
as it is right now, people are mentally considering email like enveloped mail, while in networking terms its more like postcards. I wonder how much this can be blamed on mail software that shows unread mail as unopened envelopes...
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so in other words, we are looking at a piece of technology that in the long run will have to force some kind of one world government, or else the net will be basically undone by the mess of laws and regulations that makes up the nations of this planet?
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so in other words, we are looking at a piece of technology that in the long run will have to force some kind of one world government, or else the net will be basically undone by the mess of laws and regulations that makes up the nations of this planet?
I think you've got it. But we should add that, although that global "government" (or more likely, a treaty association) may pass laws that protect your data from prying corporate eyes, it certainly won't pass laws that protect your data from prying government
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Whether the data is in the cloud makes no difference with respect to discovery requests. If you are served a discovery subpoena, you have to turn over the data whether it's in the cloud or not.
The difference is that under the Stored Communications Act, the provider can turn it over to the Government without notifying you. That's what has most data security experts nervous about cloud storage.
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Or worse, an overly broad discovery request could sweep your data up in it.
Imagine if the cops came to serve a search warrant on your neighbor but, perhaps because they didn't understand the underlying infrastructure, they just decided to search the whole block.
Can't happen? Unlawful search and seizure? What if
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steve jackson games, anyone?
Re:Whom are we securing it from? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloud computing violates the first rule of security: Don't let the data be accessible in any shape or form to those not authorized. It goes with one of the fundamental rules of the Internet which is often ignore:, don't put anything on a Net accessible computer that you would be afraid of it ending up linked off of 4chan.
Cloud computing has some seductive properties for PHBs: It is just a network jump away through an API, requires no dedicated equipment on the client site, and the big named company salespeople who play in the same foursome at the golf course sell the stuff.
However, if one drops the smoke and mirrors, there isn't much difference between cloud storage and FTP-ing files onto a remote site.
So, what does one do? Before someone states "encrypt it!" one has to know that there are two parts to encrypting:
First is choosing the algorithms (AES-256, and if worried about an AES crack, chain AES and Serpent or Twofish [1]) and how they are implemented (ECB bad, XTS good). You also add to this how one can tell if the key is valid, and one of the most secure ways is to have the key use a salt, decrypt part of the cyphertext, and check it against a known value. TrueCrypt does this when validating if a filesystem is OK to mount.
The second part is not as obvious, but it means as much to secured data as the cypher: Key management is where you feel the burn. The simplest key management is having some random passphrase the maximum length allowed stored in a file on a USB flash drive and printed out for safekeeping. However, this runs you into the same issues as using WPA2-PSK, if the key is divulged on one area, the whole security of the system is now compromised.
Which means that you have to have a system of subkeys where the keys will decrypt the master key, similar to how PGP stores multiple passphrases and public key information to open a PGPDisk. You can give everyone a different passphrace to remember, or you can give them some type of smart card that unlocks the information. If a passphrase is divulged, it will suck, but given time, it can be removed from the authorized list.
Don't forget not just using one volume key for the data, one needs to use a different one every so often, so a compromised subkey which allows someone to slurp up the main decryption key won't compromise everything.
In reality, after a company goes through their iterations of a key management system, going from passphrases to RSA keys (because passphrases are hard to remember), then going from a list of keys to a full blown PKI with multiple recovery mechanisms, companies usually end up going to a smart card system. Of course, this is expensive and requires an elaborate support structure, but it is the best way of dealing with key management we have. And of course smart cards have driver hell in most cases.
So, with all the complexity that one needs to have in place for an encryption layer before stuff ends up stored offsite, it gets to a point where why should one even bother? Instead, for a number of SMBs with a non trivial amount of employees, they should just buy tape libraries and a backup program that has encryption. Some drives (like some of HP's) have encryption functionality in hardware. Then after the tapes are backed up, they are either stored in the data center (with restricted access), a tape safe, or an Iron Mountain tub.
What is the advantage of going back to tape even though cloud computing is seductive and seems like all problems of storage are just an Internet connection away? You know who has physical possession of the data at all times. It is a lot easier to deny someone access to physical media by rekeying locks, yanking their HID card access, or striking their name from the authorized user rolls at the offsite system than it is to deny access to stuff where you don't know even where it is stored.
With physical media, you have two pieces of security. The physical media itself, and the encryption on it. With cloud storage, ALL your se
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... one of the fundamental rules of the Internet which is often ignore:, don't put anything on a Net accessible computer that you would be afraid of it ending up linked off of 4chan.
Well, since most of my files are online right now, the ones I'd worry about being linked to 4chan are mostly the ones that I got from 4chan.
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If we outsource our data storage into the cloud then I probably don't even know where that data is, much less who can put their hands on those servers. Can I trust anonymo
Security aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you trust other companies to manage your electronic secrets?
I would never, no matter what promise.
Besides, we all know the track-records of the companies offering this and they are real bad at least in my opinion.
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Would you truth other companies to manage your physical secrets? Well, lots of people do. They're called banks.
Banks.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you truth other companies to manage your physical secrets? Well, lots of people do. They're called banks.
I may be wrong here but I'm still convinced my super secret stuff will be safer in a safety deposit box (where I have the only copy of one the two keys needed to open it), which is located behind a massive steel door, encased in layers upon layers of concrete in the cellar of a bank than those secrets will be if I store them on "the cloud". It takes a court order (which isn't easy to get in most places since the banks tend to fight them tooth and nail) or a gang of seasoned bank robbers with a lot of time on their hands and some very heavy equipment to lift my secrets from that vault. On "the cloud" the only thing standing between my secrets and Russian mafia hackers is a badly paid marginally competent sysadmin in an IT sweatshop in India.
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I trust several companies to manage my physical secrets:
Iron Mountain manages tapes and offsite stuff.
My bank manages the pathetically small amount I have in checking, as well as allows me to store crucial files in a safe deposit box.
U-haul manages a storage I have.
However there is a difference between physical secrets and electronic ones: If someone tries to mess with the stuff I have in storage, it will be evident. Either via a broken seal, a cracked off padlock, a broken label, or some other means. Th
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If your SaaS provider goes out of business it's not really a good substitute for them to say "Here's 213MB of data. It's not the same data you gave us, but it's the same amount so that's good enough, yes?"
Along the same lines, if your bank has a security screw-up and reveals y
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I wouldn't put my private data up even onto a cloud of a company I trust completely. It could still get PATRIOT Acted into the hands of pretty much everyone who I don't want to see it.
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Don't forget: The US isn't the only company with a USAPATRIOT-like law.
Store data on an Elbonian server, and the data is available to their intel agencies and law enforcement (who likely will use the data to help their companies compete, or if they don't like the West, direct attackers to soft targets.)
Those archives of tax records stored on a cloud? Better hope your encryption is tight, not just now, but can stand attacks 20 years from now. I'm sure that in 20 years, AES will have cracks starting to sho
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I wouldn't put my private data up even onto a cloud of a company I trust completely.
And you're going to pay to maintain your own hardware and software installations as an upshot of that choice. As long as you're willing to deal with the consequences, your decision is fine. The only time there's a problem with the cloud is when you're forced into using it for your private data because there's no choice. (But then again, that's generally when there's a monopoly about instead of a free market...)
BTW, successful cloud providers are probably more likely to take good care of your data than some
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Definitely. If it's anything more complicated than a simple website or ftp site it's worth doing it on your own box and renting rack space if necessary. It's come to my painful attention that not even Microsoft can be relied upon to handle email properly so outsourcing that to hotmail is a very bad idea for business email (DNS problems at a Microsoft exchange farm meant that I wouldn't have been abl
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My point here is not Microsoft bashing, my point is even such a large company can not be relied upon
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Since when have niggers been allowed to own property? Tell the truth; you stole that computer from a white person.
TCP/IP is a cloud we trust (Score:4, Insightful)
We already trust the cloud a bit. We use the internet to move stuff around. Do we trust intermediate nodes not to eavesdrop or
steal our data? No... we use SSL. Do we trust the intermediate nodes to deliver our packets on time? No... we wait for ACKs and use timeouts.
Seems to be this is just like cloud storage. Use it but don't just it all. Encrypt everything. Periodically pull the data back to make sure its OK, etc.
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When all your data is hosted and processed in 'the cloud' (just offsite, on someone else's machine basically) no amount
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SSL is different. The encryption key that is used is used just for the communication, then is tossed. In general, one will not have a SSL negotiated key for last week's bank transaction on their computer.
Because the SSL key management is about keys that are tossed, there isn't much of an issue with the nodes in between.
Cloud computing is about long term, persistant storage. The session key that gets chucked in SSL has to be kept permanently somewhere when it comes to storage, and key management is a majo
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Many banks use multiple layers of security for data traversing WAN links:
- the WAN link itself is supposedly secure and encrypted intrinsically by the provider
- vpns run over the wan links. All traffic runs over these vpns
- data is forbidden from being sent in clear, even though it's running over a vpn. ssh et al are used to secure data that traverses
The advantage of layering is:
- if one layer of security fails by accident, the data is not necessarily compromised
- if one layer of security fails by design
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Cloud Computing Security Is Another Name for DRM (Score:2)
While they may sound different, the Cloud Computing security problem seems to be almost identical to any other Digital Rights Management problem. Both are concerned with only exposing what the information owner wants exposed to the underlying hardware/provider/user/etc.
It's just a question of whose "Cloud" you are trying to secure information on, and who the "user" of said information is supposed to be.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft today implemented its 100% Data Confidentiality package for T-Mobile Sidekick, comprehensively protecting users’ contacts, email and messages from any possible attacker [newstechnica.com].
“Our data security is impenetrable,” said Steve Ballmer, “and will reassure everyone of the data integrity of our Windows Azure Screen Of Death cloud computing and Windows Mobile initiatives.”
Microsoft plans to leverage the new confidentiality mechanism to finally purge the horror of Vista from the face of the earth, in the same manner as firing all the contractors who knew how to build Windows 2000 and having to reconstruct Windows XP from bits of NT 4.
Microsoft Sharepoint users looked forward to a similar denouement as the only safe way to scour their hopelessly incompetent organisations from the world in a manner that would not infect successor organisations.
Microsoft is putting together an outsourcing proposal to the UK government for data protection.
Never safe. (Score:3, Informative)
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but you can't even be sure that the bootloader of your virtual server isn't messed with
Trusted Computing would let you do exactly that. Which is why Trusted Cloud Computing [mpi-sws.org] has been suggested.
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You can't even be sure that the (virtual) hardware or TPM chip of your (virtual) server hasn't been messed with. Anything that was man-build, can be hacked somehow.
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Yes, but this requires physical access. The TPM is designed to prevent (or make noticeable) purely software-based attacks. This changes the risk considerably. If you have some confidence in physical security, you're now in a much stronger position.
While what you say is broadly true, it isn't about absolute security, but about raising the bar high enough. If you make it more difficult to break the security than access to the machine is worth, you've won, even if the security isn't perfect.
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If you read the paper in detail, it says that the attacks affect Bitlocker, not all TPM based security. They do not compromise the authenticated boot capability of the TPM. You still cannot pretend to have booted a different system to the one you have.
There are plenty of things to criticise about Trusted Computing, but spotting boot-process malware is one thing it does very well. It works for the question "has this platform been booted with the correct software?" but not "has this platform always been bo
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"Trusted Computing" just means the hardware (and OS) manufacturer "trusts" you to do what they want you to do. Make a competing product or support open source, then suddenly they don't "trust" you and revoke your key.
It is a code censorship system, not security system. Security can be shoehorned in, but if they allow (or before the manufacturer/OS company revokes the key and it propagates), a "trusted" party could run just about any code they want on a "trusted" machine, including rooting your server or c
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I don't get why it isn't obvious, but if you can't trust your hosting provider, you can't trust the server you run at their site. Period. If you can't trust them with the root password, then you shouldn't be hosting with them. They have physical access. Any 20 minute downtime (which you may never notice) could be them pulling the hard drive and cloning it, then putting it back.
Even if you encrypt the hard drive, most likely they could stage a MITM attack one way or another to get the key. They can go to t
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And thin-client computing is a rehash of greens screens connected to a mainframe.
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It's not so much a rehash as an extraordinarily bad reimplementation of the client-server model. Look at the horror stories like AJAX you have to use to do it. The whole is papered together and the only thing that makes it even remotely usable is that the speed of computers and networks are such that it makes your average "Cloud" app feel like a slow version of a Windows 3.1 program running on a 386DX-33.
Security is not an absolute! (Score:2)
For crissakes, people who say something needs to be secure before it can be trusted really get on my nerves. Anyone who's waded out of the shallow end of the pool on security (of any kind) knows one of the fundamentals of security is that it isn't perfect. No matter how good you make your mouse-trap, there will someday be a better mouse. The more realistic analysis is to ask yourself what the acceptable risk is. Or, put another way, you should strive to ensure that the security is more difficult to break th
Sure it can be. (Score:2)
All that you need to do is encrypt the data portion with a key that's generated from two one-time pads of 256-bit random keys, and then wipe out all traces of the pads.
They the data will be secure, even from you. :-)
You Cannot Trust Anyone with your Data. (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is you can't trust anyone with your data. For the systems to do something (other than store) your data it must be unencrypted. If it's unencrypted, it's not safe from prying eyes. (Internal sysadmins and external eavesdroppers who have compromised systems in the cloud.) End of story.
Remember there's two kinds of trust, "I'm giving you they keys to the kingdom and I believe you won't do anything bad while I'm not looking," and "I've locked everything and I trust the locks will hold against mali
Put up your own servers! (Score:1, Troll)
In the name of probably pretty much all of us:
1. Unless yo smoke weed: Shut the fuck up about your “cloud“ shit!
2. iPhones, iPods, iAssplugs, iBubbles, iFails: See point 1.
3. It is OK to call hooters 'knockers' and sometimes snack trays
4. It is wrong to be French (Yeah, that was the point 4 you always forgot. ^^)
5. PROFIT
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Man... nobody remembers Al Bundy’s 10 commandments anymore?? :((
Please hand in your NO-MA'AM member cards right now.
Oh, and we get an Apple slashvertisement *every single freaking day* for a long time now. Nobody cares. Stop it.
And if you objected to point 1... please hand in your geek card, and prepare for a ass-kicking shitstorm. ^^
Security is the NEXT great challenge? (Score:2)
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Such is the power of IT marketing, ooooooooo look a pretty flower...
In other words... (Score:1)
The future of technology depends greatly on the future of technology. Hooray for buzzwords
Emerging encryption technologies (Score:2)
"Emerging encryption technologies" such as Gentry's doubly-homomorphic encryption (which is what the link points to) tend to have a major disadvantage: they tend to be horribly inefficient. We're talking 6 orders of magnitude minimum, probably more like 12 orders. Unless there's a major breakthrough, this is not going to help.
Cryptographic engineering solutions, like DRM, might help. But then again, they might not: they require lots of engineering effort from the cloud providers, which they have little i
For most users, cloud storage is more secure (Score:1)
Most people do not know how to make their machines secure. Most people do not know how to encrypt their hard drives. Most people do not know how to protect against viruses or trojans. Most people even do not have backups.
I agree that for us geeks, the kind of security measures that we apply to our machines make our data safer than they would be in the clo
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.....But it is wrong to assume that data is secure just because it is stored locally...
However, a government cannot get it your data as easily without you knowing about it. That may not matter to many people, but it is important to some.
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Wouldn't it be better to find ways to increase the security of the average folks WITHOUT introducing all of the other risks?
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Amazon EC2 runs Ubuntu ... as does the Ubuntu on-site KVM-based "internal cloud." The sales point is being able to bounce your stuff from your own internal cluster to EC2 when you need a quick burst of capacity.
So it's as secure as Linux on the Internet ... or that the attacker has access to the hardware of.
OpenBSD anyone?
Why Bother? (Score:4, Informative)
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There is a cost of letting them store data: You lose assurance of physical access. For some things, this is just fine. I highly recommend offsite backup utilities (Mozy or Carbonite) for students and SOHO people because combined with a keyfile stored in another safe place, it offers good security even if someone's office gets destroyed. But this doesn't scale. My Carbonite keyfile that protects the data stored offsite for three machines is not going to be a usable solution for a SMB with an IT departme
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For small businesses with a single point of contact, maybe cloud storage is fine. However, for bigger businesses, it is better off to just go with a d2d2t solution, and offsite backups. This way, data is physically protected from compromise, but is stored redundantly.
You're right about small businesses. They typically won't have a dedicated sysadmin at all; the owner, owner's spouse, or (in a slightly larger business) secretary will occasionally look after the computer(s), but they won't be able to carry the overhead of a dedicated tech support staff. For these sorts of firms, any backups are a good step forward and backups to the cloud have the benefit of not being so inclined to be lost in a fire.
As the size of business considered increases, your suggestion of d2d2t2o
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And all I can say to you Ralph is.....
"Music these days suck."
Betcha you cant find me :P
Cloud computing ? (Score:2)
Cloud computing is all vapour anyway.