German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

The threat scenario is a bit far fetched. First you'd need to find out where an individual, interesting piece of data is stored. Then you have to break into this building, break open the cabinet and freeze the RAM fast enough to preserve the memory content.

That's obviously something that can be done, but it requires a lot of dedication to pull of, so that's something you'd only do in case where you know the data is valuable. It's probably easier to just get an inside job done, but you could get that at any other datacenter or even at AWS.

For a lot of data, the payoff is not worth the effort and risk, so I'd be unconcerned. Obviously, don't store bank accounts or medical data there, don't use it for the next NSA datacenter etc.

>remove data from RAM before attackers can get to it //

Seems about the last thing you'd try too. Surely you'd try and catch the data on the wire a long time before you'd even contemplate this sort of scenario. At least then you have the chance to get the whole encrypted file you're after.

Maybe they mean the ability to obtain a 50Mbps connection?

I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful.

This scheme takes hot air and either gives it some use - heating a room - or dumps it.

Burying pipes to get heat from the ground is quite popular. This is just a version of that.

I'm not sure it's as bad as the "green washing" that many companies do.

A possible approach would be: keep the data encrypted, just decrypt it at the endpoint. Tarsnap for example does that. Or keep the keys on servers that are acting as proxies and decrypt the data. Or actually loose all data on door opening. Just drop it and use a replication like backblaze and S3 use. A harddrive lost? Allocate a shard somewhere else. A unit looses enough harddrives to require service? Just pull it, trash it, plug in a new one.

Given that the units are spread out further than servers in a datacenter, you probably want that anyways. Your service teams don't want coordinate access to the device, drive there and the homeowner does not show up for something as mundane as an HDD swap.

I think your suggestion of using a pressure sensor is a great mechanism. Then, as you say, you need to be able to restore the keys (stored offsite) so you can do maintenance.

This is an engineering problem: how secure do you want to be; how many mechanisms do you need to achieve that; does this come in under the cost budget. Your pressure-sensor solution alone is probably good enough for a large number of applications already.

But this is not a research problem: we don't have to solve homomorphic encryption!

No free heat for you.

> Basically cut the sucker open on the side.

Fine, thin, looped resistance wire - if you drill or cut through it, its resistance changes (either to infinite in case of a clean cut, or a couple ohms in case of two or three shorted-together loop).

> Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you can open the cabinet, and "close" the cabinet from the sensors perspective while leaving it opened.

Use a Raspberry Pi together with a UPS-backed fiber modem and a cellular modem backup uplink in case someone cuts the fiber, and the threat is basically neutralized (okay, someone may jam the phone signal, but then again this can be detected by carrier loss).

> that the economics of connecting and servicing single cabinets randomly located all over the landscape

I kinda thought the same.

But assuming it can be properly encrypted (hard) what's the difference to swapping in a new server compared to swapping in a new gas bottle? User pays for the initial infrastructure.

Pull the old one out, pop the new one in, 60 seconds, any blue collar worker can do it, if it's setup properly. It would even be automatically checked remotely it was done 100% correctly.

Once every 3 years? Probably cost $50 a pop? Not necessarily crazy.

Maybe they're hoping that their biggest customers will be office buildings that have space to spare. Each building could house a fair number of servers.

Realistically speaking, I suspect that if this does take off (and it is a very cool idea), they won't actually install those things in living rooms due to noise concerns. Those racks are going to be in the basement where the other heating equipment typically is.

So police are going to get a warrant that is limited to the basement room containing the racks. the home owners will be slightly annoyed and inconvenienced, but they aren't going to put up a fight against the warrant. They'll be more than happy to cooperate with the police.

Scroll up a bit and you will see this comment:

> Ladies and Gentlemen, i present: Bullshit. I wish companies with no clue about encryption would stop making these insane claims.

Which is rude and does not make a cogent argument, and yet 3 people asked for clarification instead of downvoting it.

The (lack of a) downvoting policy here is abysmal and no one wants to talk about it.

Hi, can you please email hn@ycombinator.com about an unrelated matter?