You say encryption is complicated but actually as a vendor its implicit in our system. As a customer you just mark the drive upon creation and then its invisible to both you as a customer and the cloud servers that are using the drive. That's really the whole idea, to make security measures that are convenient so people actually use them. Our customers see usually about a 10%-15% performance difference and we've got pretty high storage performance to begin with so it rarely means taking a performance hit compared with other platforms. We also allow multiple drives so users can categorise data by drives for encryption or not. Of course I'm biased regarding performance but the principles stand.
The other point of the blog post is to ask; what do other vendors do and do their customers have the ability to find out? Security through obscurity isn't an acceptable approach in the cloud. Everyone needs to be transparent and work to build confidence through solid information and education on how to use the cloud securely and effectively.
Kind regards,
Patrick
How does one revert this without physical access to the drive?
We overwrite our EBS volumes with zeros before deleting them and I was under the impression that should protect us against leakage to other customers.
Naturally it can't protect us against a malicious amazon employee pulling the drive physically (or taking snapshots without our knowledge), but frankly I don't see how your "vendor encryption" helps with that either.
If all I do is set a checkbox to "mark the drive for encryption" then that means
a) You have the encryption key, I don't.
b) The checkbox could just as well be a placebo and not have any effect.
No need to take a 10%-15% performance hit for that.
Best wishes,
Patrick
As a Swiss based cloud currently we'd be excluded from many US industry sectors which required domestic hosting. This will change shortly (can't say more) and when it does we'll be working to put in place the necessary coverage/compliance certificates to expand into these sectors.
Best wishes,
Patrick
It's too bad because the medical space is in dire need of innovation and there's a lot of money to be made.
Kind regards,
Patrick
Storing encrypted first does affect performance but it is generally much less and more predictable (doing a big secure delete on a drive inflicts an immediate and unexpected hit on that part of a storage array).
We think encryption is also just a lot more robust. If you don't lay down the data in the first place in readable form on the physical drives, its eliminates a lot of data leakage possibilities.
Best wishes,
Patrick
Have you ever looked at a freshly mounted EBS volume on EC2? It shows all zero's for me. And I'm almost sure that was not just a coincidence for the volumes I looked at.
Moreover there are more efficient ways than encryption or "full sweep overwrite" to address this at the storage-level.
Best wishes,
Patrick