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I want this on a simpler scale: an external drive that has a physical switch. In normal operation the switch is in "append only" mode and the drive ensures that
by tgb 6y ago
I want this on a simpler scale: an external drive that has a physical switch. In normal operation the switch is in "append only" mode and the drive ensures that nothing can be erased. Only when the switch is temporarily hit to a "unsafe" mode would it allow deleting to make more space. I don't know how easy or difficult this would be (I assume external drives don't typically know about filesystem-level information like this), but it would be a nice product for people with simpler needs than yours. If the backup system can write only incremental changes then the storage requirements would likely be fine for many users.
- temp0826 6y agoYep, not a new concept- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once_read_many https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once_read_many
- netflixandkill 6y agoThere are USB drives that do vaguely similar things but it's all in software. It's difficult to do that unless the filesystem has append only functionality, metadata blocks are rewritten all the time even if data isn't. For anyone who has serious (I.e. $$$) need of that they already have tapes and optical WORM media though. You can do something conceptually similar with any sort of NAS that provides immutable snapshots as long as the management and control is effectively out of band. The out of band part is the key. Our SAN data has snapshots. The backups are written to another storage device that only has an API key to write them to B2 storage. An attacker would effectively need to completely compromise multiple admins in the organization to get at all the stages of data duplication, and frankly there is no additional line of defense for total compromise if the attacker is willing to wait for physical tape or disk swaps. Fortunately for ransomware, time is money for them too.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoAre there any NAS devices with out-of-band management actually available, though?
- benjohnson 6y agoSpin up a FreeBSD box, enable ZFS snapshots and disable SSH? You’d only be able to destroy the snapshots from a monitor and keyboard under normal circumstances.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoWell, yeah. I was more asking "does somebody make such a thing purpose-built?"
- WalterBright 6y ago> There are USB drives that do vaguely similar things but it's all in software. Sigh. When are people going to accept that software switches are inherently not secure? How many times must these fail? > It's difficult to do that unless the filesystem has append only functionality, metadata blocks are rewritten all the time even if data isn't. There's no reason to continue writing anything to a hard drive once the backup to it is finished.
- selfhoster11 6y agoA software switch might as well not exist at all. They are not secure, or useful, because they can just be ignored by the host machine.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rsj_hn 6y agoGDPR may require active online systems to delete data in response to a stream of realtime requests, so while the availability solution is to make deletion a hard, manual process or a process controlled only by an isolated infrastructure team, as you automate GDPR deletion requests you will need to start exposing deletion APIs accessible to end users. This is why a lot of the comments about making read-only backups or offline backups are very challenging for firms to do if they are taking GDPR seriously.