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Comment by tossandthrow | Hacker News Reader

For this thread model, the encryption should happen at the volume level, not application level.

Which is also what the author write:

>If you’re only interested in compliance requirements, you can probably just enable Full Disk Encryption and call it a day. Then, if your server’s hard drive grows legs and walks out of the data center, your users’ most sensitive data will remain confidential.

> Unfortunately, for the server-side encryption at rest use case, that’s basically all that Disk Encryption protects against.

(Something tells me that you did not read the article that is so narrow minded)

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I think I've written enough to illustrate that storage devices moves around without "growing legs and walk out"

But yes, if the author drops all security thread related to encryption at rest, then encryption at rest is useless. I agree.

It sounds to me like you read a different article than I wrote.

The point of my article was not "Encryption-At-Rest Is Bad" as you seem to have taken it to mean.

Rather, the point is that other techniques, when you sit down and actually think them through, do not provide any significant value over just phoning it in with Full Disk Encryption.

How you get from "software libraries that encrypt-at-rest routinely fail to provide value on top of full disk encryption" to "Scott says FDE is bad" is unclear.

Additionally: From a software perspective, the risks you all outlined are morally equivalent to the hard drives grew legs and walked because they are the same risk; namely, loss of control of the actual hard drives.

The article in question is focused on threats when those drives are plugged in and the keys are being used to encrypt/decrypt data. As several others have pointed out already, I explicitly state this, repeatedly. I don't know how to make it more clear.

All the risk vectors you list yourself are about physically being able to get the disk. The author states that "growing legs and walk out" (understood as people being able to physical access to the disk) is already mitigated by disk encryption.

So not only are you not adding anything to the article. You actively try to dismiss that the author has thought the cases you bring up through (and calling them out as narrow minded on false grounds).

I think we all would love to see a risk that is mitigated by encryption at rest and is not already being mitigated by disk encryption.

Is it that complicated to admit you misread and/or misinterpreted TFA and you posted a wrong comment?

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