Comment by theonewolf | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by theonewolf | Hacker News Reader

Are you really the first to use TLS in securing the storage fabric?

I believe Seagate's Kinetic had TLS features quite awhile ago: http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/kinetic-vision-how-seag...

Both of which are reminiscent of CMU's NASD research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-Attached_Secure_Disks

New things that are really cool from Blockbridge:

1. Opening up WAN access to storage devices via TLS

2. Kernel drivers (for all major OS's?) allowing storage devices over the WAN

3. Re-imagining how we access block devices

Opens up the possibility for EBS-like storage across the WAN which is, simply, amazing.

theonewolf, to the best our knowledge, we are the first to offer TLS protected iSCSI (a block storage transport). As we said in the post, SSL was considered back when the iSCSI protocol was developed, but IPsec won out. Many people use TLS today for object storage (ie. S3, Kinetic, etc.). That said, this post is less of a “pitch” and more of a “here’s what's possible with modern technology”. Regarding NASD, If I recall correctly, that was a file based research project.

BTW, regarding the drivers: none needed, you can do it from userland on any platform with a simple SSL proxy like stunnel. If you want, reach out and we can hook you up with software to play around with.

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