Cloud Storage Security Challenge
nasuni.com
nasuni.com
Obviously if OpenPGP could be broken, there are much bigger rewards than a lame $5000 dollars from nasuni.
They picked an encryption scheme that has stood the test of time and hackers. It's "known" to be secure (as meaningless as that word is in the field of security) and the only question is whether or not the NSA has some secret way of getting past it, but the general consensus is that no one does.
They let others do all the hard work for them and are doing nothing more than directly using PGP/OpenGPG............. except, of course, to their average client, that has no meaning. To them, "Nasuni has done something super great with security and they're so confident, they're DARING hackers to break it."
Brilliant idea, I say.
Not that I think that will happen, just saying.
Meanwhile, there is no trivial way I can find to get details on how your system works, or on the details of what aspects of OpenPGP you use or how your system is configured to use it. To download a white paper on your security, I was asked to fill out a form. No.
As a practitioner, this contest doesn't demonstrate to me the resilience of "modern encryption". It demonstrates to me that you've never had a professional assessment of your system and that you don't understand how "modern crypto" actually breaks. To someone with a basic understanding of how cryptosystems work, your contest has the impact opposite to the one you intend.
Having said all that, the fact that you use OpenPGP instead of a vanity "AES plus RSA" scheme might be a plus. You know, if you documented it anywhere.
As if doing something illegal would stop a real world attack.
The idea we are trying to get across is that the data we store, in the cloud, is secure against the number one cloud storage adoption concern - leakage of personal and corporate data.
2) DoS (mainly, try to compromise the Amazon S3 credentials; or, a malicious Amazon) -- all I'd need to do is flip one bit in your bucket and your OpenPGP checksums wouldn't match...; I could also do malicious MITM attacks between S3 and the "cloudlane" box)
3) Availability attacks vs. S3 -- for a lot of users, confidentiality and integrity are important, but if I can make S3 unavailable to you at the network layer, it might kill the online performance of your application. This isn't as big a deal for archival storage, but if someone thinks using crypto for confidentiality is enough to move an otherwise-in-house app to the cloud safely, it might be fun to provide some user education.
Ultimately it's a judgement call as to how secure and reliable you consider your local network to be in relation to the prospect of handing your data over to someone you don't know to store in an unknown location under unknown conditions with unknown levels of access by unknown individuals.
Also, even if off-site storage is totally secure there is always the risk of your data being held to ransom at some point in the future. The cloud hosting company can arbitrarily decide to increase their administration fees at any time, and if most of your data is entrusted to them then you may have little option but to pay up (the "stand and deliver" business model).
We fully acknowledge and concur with Schneier.
No. Key management isn't the problem. Key management is what people bring up when they mean "I haven't really looked at the underlying crypto very carefully". It's a punt answer that leaves people feeling warm and fuzzy about actual cryptography, when actual cryptography is likely as not to be the thing that actually kills you.