OT: Cloud Computing is coming to ...

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Tuesday, July 20, 2010 16:16:30 Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On 07/20/2010 10:58 AM, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> > I am opposed to it, because I don't want to trust a third party with my
> > files, with my documents, ..., etc.  I agree with Richard Stallman on
> > this one:
> > 
> > http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.
> > stallman
> 
> A properly-designed cloud computing solution is one where the virtual
> machines being hosted in the cloud can be fully encrypted so that the
> hosting provider cannot (feasibly) glean any information from them.
> 
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux (like Fedora) supports full-disk encryption
> with LUKS, making it a perfect solution for a cloud-based system.
> 
> So with an encrypted system, all you're renting is time on someone
> else's host, while all of your data remains private to you. Sounds good
> to me!

Until the cloud server fails, or refuses to let you access your account until 
you pay for subscription. Then all your data remains locked-out from you.

There are also security concerns. Imagine you have a security hole and an 
intruder gains access to your files on the cloud. If the files were on a local 
machine, you can always unplug the network cable until you fix the issue. If 
the files are on the cloud, you cannot do that --- you get locked out by the 
intruder, who gets to keep all your data.

Access to the hardware is the ultimate line of defense in these scenarios, 
IMHO.

Also, I'm not sure about encryption to be completely bullet-proof thing. If 
your whole OS is on the cloud, someone with enough physical access can clone 
the whole thing on their local machine and spend arbitrary large time breaking 
the encryption. Or store a copy of your encrypted data, waiting for better 
hardware (to be created in years to come) which would be able to break the 
encryption.

Best, :-)
Marko