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Comment by lbotos | Hacker News Reader

> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data.

Right, and your example of a literal server in a basement supports that, but if you are colocating or using a VPS they will almost definitely go to your provider first and probably won't even tell you.

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Nope. If you colocate hardware which you own (which is what colocation means), then they can't just go get your hardware. Even if they break the law and nab your hardware, you'll know because it's down.

With VPSes, they can get your data and you might never know. It's an extremely important distinction.

To clarify this, the government has to go through certain procedures to seize your private property. If you own a hardware server, it is your property, even if it is sitting in someone else’s data center.

Supposedly they have to do that for safety deposit boxes too, but as recent events have shown in LA, that doesn't stop them from seizing everything including those boxes and then opening them up to take inventory. A judge objects, but it's too late. Now people are having to prove that they own whatever was in those boxes to get back their stuff back, and if they can't -- everything is gone.

If you encrypt the disk is a VPS provider going bother going to effort of trying to hook into the running machine via their hypervisor in a way that won't be evident to the owner of the server?

I'm not saying they can't I just don't see that they would spend their time doing this when they can send to the request to the server's owner and then it's no longer their problem to deal with.

Dumping VM memory contents is pretty trivial.

AMD's SEV and Intel's SGX should protect from this. Of course, you still have to take the VPS provider's word that they've enabled them on their CPUs.

That is for applications specifically written to compute on the secure element, no?

The parent poster probably got his terminology confused. AFAIK SGX runs on the secure element, SEV is for isolating the VM from the host.

...which is approximately zero VPS providers. I haven't seen them advertised outside of specialty azure/aws instance types.

> you still have to take the VPS provider's word that they've enabled them

No, you don't. Both of those implementations provide hardware attestation via vendor keys securely embedded in the CPU. I have no idea if any providers currently make such features available though.

Unless you’re in an environment where you literally have to type or provide the decrypting key on each start, you are dealing with a situation where your provider has both the encrypted data and the encryption key.

> Unless you in an environment where you literally have to type or provide the decrypting key on each start

The OS may boot up, but one could have the data on a separate volume. Services won't start until that volume is mounted, which could be manual-only. Either LUKS-on-any-FS or encrypted ZFS would work.

With encrypted (Open)ZFS you can actually send encrypted bits remotely: the destination does not need the key to save the bit stream to disk, so you can have a secure cold storage copy of your data.

> There's an even more compelling reason to choose OpenZFS native encryption, though—something called "raw send." ZFS replication is ridiculously fast and efficient—frequently several orders of magnitude faster than filesystem-neutral tools like rsync—and raw send makes it possible not only to replicate encrypted datasets and zvols, but to do so without exposing the key to the remote system.

> This means that you can use ZFS replication to back up your data to an untrusted location, without concerns about your private data being read. With raw send, your data is replicated without ever being decrypted—and without the backup target ever being able to decrypt it at all. This means you can replicate your offsite backups to a friend's house or at a commercial service like rsync.net or zfs.rent without compromising your privacy, even if the service (or friend) is itself compromised.

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/a-quick-start-guide-...

Nobody is arguing that it's not possible. We're just saying it's a huge hassle and that even being willing to go through the hassle on every boot is itself a red flag.

It's not a huge hassle, it's a mild hassle. I'm no ZFS expert, but LUKS is trivial.

How many times do your systems reboot?

But typing in the key at boot / mount time is the only setup when disk encryption makes any sense at all.

Full disk encryption with the key stored in a TPM or something makes sense as a way to enable a quick secure erase. If you clear the key from the TPM, the storage is useless; or if the storage gets removed for decommisioning, it's going to be hard to match it back up to the TPM, even if the TPM isn't cleared.

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