3 ms·
Encryption won't protect you - the cloud provider has access to executables (in ram and perhaps on disc), your keys (ram and disc) and the data both pre and pos
by gridspy 11y ago
Encryption won't protect you - the cloud provider has access to executables (in ram and perhaps on disc), your keys (ram and disc) and the data both pre and post encryption (in ram).
Because they control the hypervisor, they control everything. That means they have as much access and authority as the code that you are running on their servers have. So the only way to protect yourself from them is to limit what your servers (deployed on their cloud) can actually do.
So for instance you could have a secure backend server on a dedicated host in a trusted environment, with the cloud servers using an API to the backend server. If the API is suitably secure then the cloud servers could be compromised without allowing them to directly issue invalid commands in the same way the backend server could. Then you could use the cloud to scale out your web frontend without compromising yourself.
The same is true of hardware on the dedicated host (such as the "Trusted Computing" Module) that you do not control. If that (or the BIOS) gets compromised you might not even know that your host is no longer secure.
- dantiberian 11y agoIn a limited way, this is what Apple does with iCloud. The customer data is encrypted and stored at AWS and Azure, and presumably decrypted on servers Apple runs and controls.
- illumin8 11y agoYou can use hardware security modules in datacenter space you physically control to store the private keys used to encrypt your data at "CloudCo". Amazon even offers this service and calls it Cloud HSM. There's always the in-memory vulnerability, which is harder to mitigate, but requires an attacker with physical access to the hypervisor, so it's much more difficult to execute (as most meat-space hacks are).