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Comment by warrentr | Hacker News Reader

And what happens when your house burns down? You must have at least two copies ... back to the cloud

"The cloud" could mean anything from a server in colo, to a desktop in a close friend's apartment, to riseup.net, to Amazon, to Google. Right now only a few of those are practical, and even fewer are scalable.

Backups are much more practical to encrypt and put in the cloud than the software you're actively using. Though hopefully the software we're actively using can be encrypted too.

Well, we're still running machines with - NX bit aside - Von Neumann architecture. Software is still data, just the sort of data that makes meaning for computer to execute. Don't see any issues with backing up the software.

I think I've heard of some approaches to conceal the actual algorithm from the computing unit (by obfuscation, or by distributing the actual calculation between multiple units), given that the software we're actively using doesn't do anything secret - and is likely to be a free and open source software, it doesn't make much sense to protect the executable code besides integrity checks.

The problem is that if our software on a cloud server has to use our encrypted private data, at bare minimum has to decrypt it, perform operations on it, and re-encrypt the revised data. Which can be resource-intensive.

If the server's capable to decrypt the data, unless you use a trusted HSM that keeps an audit trail, it generally doesn't make sense to encrypt in the first place. Especially with anything resource-intensive. When the server has everything to decrypt the data, the encryption only does the obfuscation, not any strong protection.

Otherwise, if we talk about - just for example - a receiving mail server (MDA) that has encrypted mailbox storage like [1], then it really depends on how much mail you receive. For a typical personal mailbox, where the steady rate is less than an email-per-minute (and usual email size is some kilobytes, not megabytes), encryption overhead is negligible. Such server would sleep most of time anyway.

[1]: https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...

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