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Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

those documents exist in some form, either partial or whole, in your local system memory, video memory, and probably a filesystem cache of some sort. they also traverse your network subsystem and other IO buffers/subsystems.

a root level compromise on your system can see any of this stuff in plaintext as it gets shifted around.

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> a root level compromise on your system can see any of this stuff in plaintext as it gets shifted around.

Sure, but that was true without cloud storage, too. Worse: Without cloud storage, a root level compromise lets the attacker destroy your only copy.

However, this does not refute the argument that, with the cloud, the attacker can get at your data two places, instead of just one, thereby increasing the attack surface. (In fact, the attacker can get at it three places: in transit.)

I doubt this increase in the attack surface is meaningful. If someone gains control of my device they can in all likelihood initiate a transfer of my files from cloud storage. They can also gain control of the cloud service. But the probability of the latter is too small to consider. When A >> B, A+B =~ A

if you believe in unbreakable encryption, sure. but i don't. now it's traversing an unknown number of systems, every time you view or edit.

You don't have to believe in unbreakable encryption, just like you don't have to believe in unhackable cloud hosts. You just have to believe in hard enough to break and hard enough to hack. Then you're back to stuckagain's point, slightly revised: When A >> B and A >> C, A+B+C =~ A.

(Ah, that is, you have to believe that the encryption used in all legs of transit is hard enough to break.)

i was trying to make that point w/ the network and IO buffer statement, but that describes it much better.

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