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I suppose it's OK for some use cases but realistically it doesn't provide a whole lot of security. Doing this only really protects you if someone steals the ph

I suppose it's OK for some use cases but realistically it doesn't provide a whole lot of security. Doing this only really protects you if someone steals the physical disks from inside AWS, whilst this is a legitimate risk it seems incredibly unlikely and i'm not aware of any such instance. HOWEVER, it does not protect you from the far more likely scenario of someone gaining access to your AWS account. If someone is able to get your credentials (or otherwise hack your account) then all your data is vulnerable.

gfodor 13y ago
In a lot of cases your AWS account being compromised is going to open you up to having any encryption keys you use for GPG encryption stolen too anyway. So it seems that there's a decent chance that even GPG encryption is just protecting you from the "disks stolen from the datacenter" risk. At the end of the day your AWS account is often the "master key", so make sure you use a good password, rotate it, and 2-factor auth.
- e12e 13y ago
  How's that? Say you set up duplicity on your AWS instances. They only need access to the public encryption key and private signing key -- the session (actual encryption) keys will be destroyed after a backup is made. Now, to restore you'll need to provide access to the public signing key (this is public, so no problem), and private encryption key. This should only ever be on-line and decrypted in case of a restore. Of course, if you set things up differently, then, yes. Compromised by design.
- thomseddon 13y ago
  Well clearly you wouldn't keep your keys in s3, if you were to keep them on an ec2 instance, for example, as long as you had proper SSH access configured even with AWS account access the servers would still be secure. That then makes your local SSH key the last link in the chain (and OpenSSL of course, and that you trust AWS is actually encrypting the data).

gfodor 13y ago

In a lot of cases your AWS account being compromised is going to open you up to having any encryption keys you use for GPG encryption stolen too anyway. So it seems that there's a decent chance that even GPG encryption is just protecting you from the "disks stolen from the datacenter" risk. At the end of the day your AWS account is often the "master key", so make sure you use a good password, rotate it, and 2-factor auth.

e12e 13y ago
How's that? Say you set up duplicity on your AWS instances. They only need access to the public encryption key and private signing key -- the session (actual encryption) keys will be destroyed after a backup is made. Now, to restore you'll need to provide access to the public signing key (this is public, so no problem), and private encryption key. This should only ever be on-line and decrypted in case of a restore. Of course, if you set things up differently, then, yes. Compromised by design.
thomseddon 13y ago
Well clearly you wouldn't keep your keys in s3, if you were to keep them on an ec2 instance, for example, as long as you had proper SSH access configured even with AWS account access the servers would still be secure. That then makes your local SSH key the last link in the chain (and OpenSSL of course, and that you trust AWS is actually encrypting the data).