Securing synch & share data-at-rest

 

1003163361_ba156d12f7Snowden at SXSW said last week that it’s up to the vendors to encrypt customer data. I think he was talking mostly about data-in-flight but there’s just a big an exposure for data-at-rest, maybe more so because then, all the data is available, at one sitting.

iMessage security

A couple of weeks ago there was a TechCrunch article (see Apple Explains Exactly How Secure iMessage Really Is or see the Apple IOS Security document) about Apple’s iMessage security.

The documents said that Apple iMessage uses public key encryption where every IOS/OS X device generates a pair of public and private keys (one for messages and one for signing) which are used to encrypt the data while it is transmitted through Apple’s iMessage service.  Apple encrypts the data on its iMessage App running in the devices with every destination device’s public key before it’s saved on the iMessage server cloud, which can then be decrypted on the device with its private key whenever the message is received by the device.

It’s a bit more complex for longer messages and attachments but the gist is that this data is encrypted with a random key at the device and is saved in encrypted form while residing iMessage servers. This random key and URI is then encrypted with the destination devices public keys which is then stored on the iMessage servers. Once the destination device retrieves the message with an attachment it has the location and the random key to decrypt the attachment.

According to Apple’s documentation when you start an iMessage you identify the recipient, the app retrieves the public keys for all these devices and then it encrypts the message (with each destination device’s public message key) and signs the message (with the originating device’s private signing key). This way Apple servers never see the plain text message and never holds the decryption keys.

Synch & share data security today

As mentioned in prior posts, I am now a Dropbox user and utilize this service to synch various IOS and OSX device file data. Which means a copy of all this synch data is sitting on Dropbox (AWS S3) servers, someplace (possibly multiple places) in the cloud.

Dropbox data-at-rest security is explained in their How secure is Dropbox document. Essentially they use SSL for data-in-flight security and AES-256 encryption with a random key for data-at-rest security.

This probably makes it easier to support multiple devices and perhaps data sharing because they only need to encrypt/save the data once and can decrypt the data on its servers before sending it through (SSL encrypted, of course) to other devices.

The only problem is that Dropbox holds all the encryption keys for all the data that sits on its servers. I (and possibly the rest of the tech community) would much prefer that the data be encrypted at the customer’s devices and never decrypted again except at other customer devices. This would be true end-to-end data security for sync&share

As far as I know from a data-at-rest security perspective Box looks about the same, so does EMC’s Syncplicity, Oxygen Cloud, and probably all the others. There are some subtle differences about how and where the keys are kept and how many security domains exist in each service, but in the end, the service holds the keys to all data that is encrypted on their storage cloud.

Public key cryptography to the rescue

I think we could do better and public key cryptography should show us the way. I suppose it would probably be easiest to follow the iMessage approach and just encrypt all the data with each device’s public key at the time you create/update the data and send it to the service but,

  • That would further delay the transfer of new and updated data to the synch service, also further delaying its availability at other devices linked to the login.
  • That would cause the storage requirement for your sync&share data to be multiplied by the number of devices you wish to synch with.

Synch data-at-rest security

If we just take on the synch side of the discussion first maybe it would be easiest. For example,  if a new public and private key pair for encryption and signing were to be assigned to each new device at login to the service then the service could retain a directory of the device’s public keys for data encryption and signing.

The first device to login to a synch service with a new user-id, would assign a single encryption key for all data to be shared by all devices that could use this login.  As other devices log into the service, the prime device sends the single service encryption key encrypted using the target device’s public key and signing the message with the source device’s private key. Actually any device in the service ring could do this but the primary device could be used to authenticate the new devices login credentials. Each device’s synch service would have a list of all the public keys for all the devices in the “synch” region.

As data is created or updated there are two segments of each file that are created, the AES-256 encrypted data package using the “synch” region’s random encryption key and the signature package, signed by the device doing the creation/update of the file.  Any device could authenticate the signature package at the time it receives a file, as could the service. But ONLY the devices with the AES-256 encryption key would have access to the plain text version of the data.

There are some potential holes in this process, first is that the service could still intercept the random encryption key, at the primary device when it’s created or could retrieve it anytime later at its leisure using the app running in the device. This same exposure exists for the iMessage App running in IOS/OS X devices, the private keys in this instance could be sent to another party at any time. We would need to depend on service guarantees to not do this.

Share data-at-rest security

For Apple’s iMessage attachment security the data is kept in the cloud encrypted by a random key but the key and the URI are sent to the devices when they receive the original message. I suppose this could just as easily work for a file share service but the sharing activity might require a share service app running in the target device to create public-private key pairs and access the file.

Yes this leaves any “shared” data keys being held by the service but it can’t be helped. The data is being shared with others so maybe having it be a little more accessible to prying eyes would be acceptable.

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I still prefer the iMessage approach, having multiple copies of encrypted shared data, that is encrypted by each device’s public key. It’s simpler this way, a bit more verifiable and doesn’t need to have as much out-of-channel communication (to send keys to other devices).

Yes it would cost more to store any amount of data and would take longer to transmit, but I feel we would all would be willing to support this extra constraints as long as the service guaranteed that private keys were only kept on devices that have logged into the service.

Data-at-rest and -in-flight security is becoming more important these days. Especially since Snowden’s exposure of what’s happening to web data. I love the great convenience of sync&share services, I just wish that the encryption keys weren’t so vulnerable…

Comments?

Photo Credits: Prizon Planet by AZRainman

DR preparedness in real time

As many may have seen there has been serious flooding throughout the front range of Colorado.  At the moment the flooding hasn’t impacted our homes or offices but there’s nothing like a recent, nearby disaster to focus one’s thoughts on how prepared we are to handle a similar situation.

 

What we did when serious flooding became a possibility

As I thought about what I should be doing last night with flooding in nearby counties, I moved my computers, printer, some other stuff from the basement office to an upstairs area in case of basement flooding. I also moved my “Time Machine” backup disk upstairs as well which holds the iMac’s backups (hourly for last 24 hrs, daily for past month and weekly backups [for as many weeks that can be held on a 2TB disk drive]). I have often depended on time machine backups to recover files I inadvertently overwrote, so it’s good to have around.

I also charged up all our mobiles, laptops & iPads and made sure software and email were as up-to-date as possible.  I packed up my laptop & iPad, with my most recent monthly and weekly backups and some other recent work printouts into my backpack and left it upstairs ready to go at a moments notice.

The next day post-mortum

This morning with less panic and more time to think, the printer was probably the least of my concerns but the internet and telecommunications (phones & headset) should probably have been moved upstairs as well.

Although we have multiple mobile phones, (AT&T) reception is poor in the office and home. It would have been pretty difficult to conduct business here with the mobile alone if we needed to.  I use a cable provider for business phones but also have a land line for our home. So I (technically) have triple backup for telecom, although to use the mobile effectively, we would have had to leave the office.

Internet access

Internet is another matter though. We also use cable for internet and the modem that supplies office internet connects to a cable close to where it enters the house/office. All this is downstairs, in the basement. The modem is powered using basement plugs (although it does have a battery as well) and there’s a hard ethernet link between the cable modem and an Airport Express base station (also downstairs) which provides WiFi to the house and LAN for the house iMacs/PCs.

Considering what I could do to make this a bit more flood tolerant, I should have probably moved the cable modem and Airport Express upstairs connecting it to the TV cable and powering it using upstairs power. Airport Express WiFi would have provided sufficient Internet access to work but with the modem upstairs connecting an ethernet cable to a desktop would also have been a possibility.

I do have the hotspot/tethering option for my mobile phone but as discussed above, reception is not that great. As such, it may have not sufficed for the household, let alone a work computer.

Internet is available at our local library and at many nearby coffee shops.  So, worst case was to take my laptop and head to a coffee shop/library that still had power/WiFi and camp out all day, for potentially multiple days.

I could probably do better with Internet access. With the WiFi and tethering capabilities available with cellular iPad these days, if I should just purchase one for the office, with a suitable data plan, I could have used the iPad as another hot spot, independent of my mobile. Of course, I would probably go with a different carrier so that reception issues could also be minimized (hoping where one [AT&T] is poor the other [Verizon?] carrier would be fine).

Data availability

Data access outside of the Time Machine disk and the various hard drive backups was another item I considered this morning.  I have a monthly, hard-drive backups, normally kept in a safety deposit box at a local bank.

The bank is in the same flood/fire plane that I am in, but the tell me it’s floodproof, fireproof and earthquake proof.  Call me paranoid but I didn’t see any fire suppression equipment visible in the vault. The vault door although a large quantity of steel and other metals didn’t seem to have waterproof seals surrounding it.  As for earthquakes, concrete walls, steel door doesn’t mean it’s eartquake proof.  But then again, I am paranoid, it would probably survive much better than anything in our home/office.

Also, I keep weekly encrypted backups in the house, alternating between two hard disk drives and keep the most recent upstairs. So between the weeklies, monthlies, and Time Machine I have three distinct tiers of data backups. Of course, the latest monthly was sitting in the house waiting to be moved to the safety deposit box – not good news.

I also have  a (manual) copy of work data on the laptop, current to the last hard backup (also at home). So of my three tiers of backup every single current one of them was in the home/office.

I could do better. Looking at Dropbox and Box for about $100/year/100GB (DropBox, Box is ~40% cheaper) I could keep our important work and home data on cloud storage and have access to it from any Internet accessible location (including with mobile devices) with proper security credentials. Not sure how long it would take to seed this backup we have about 20Gb of family and work office documents and probably another 120GB or so of photos that I would want to keep around or about 140GB of info.  This could provide 5-way redundancy with Time machine, weekly hard drive and monthly hard drive backups and now Box/Dropbox for a for a (office and home) fourth backup, with  the laptop being a fifth (office only) backup.  Seems like cheap insurance at the moment.

The other thing that Box/DropBox would do for me is to provide a synch service with my laptop so that files changed on either device would synch to the cloud and then be copied to all other devices.  This would substitute my current 4th tier of (work) backups with a more current, cloud backup. It would also eliminate the manual copy process performed during every backup to keep my laptop up to date.

I have some data security concerns with using cloud storage, but according to Dropbox they use Amazon S3 for their storage and AES-256 data encryption so that others can’t read your data. They use SSL to transfer data to the cloud.

Where all the keys are held is another matter and with all the hullabaloo with NSA, anything on the internet can be provided to the gov’t with a proper request. But the same could be said for my home computer and all my backups.

There are plenty of other solutions here, Google drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive to name just a few. But from what I have heard Dropbox is best, especially if you have a large number of files.

The major downsides (besides the cost) is that when you power up your system it can take longer while Dropbox scans for out-of-synch files and the time it takes to seed your Dropbox account. This is all dependent on your internet access, but according to a trusted source Dropbox seeding starts with smallest files and works up to the larger ones over time. So there is a good likelihood your office files (outside of PPT) might make it to the cloud sooner than your larger media, databases, and other large files.  I figure we have about ~140GB to be copied to the cloud. I promise to update the post with the time it took to copy this data to the cloud.

Power and other emergency preparedness

Power is yet another concern.  I have not taken the leap to purchase a generator for the home/office. But now think this unwise. Although power has gotten a lot more reliable in our home/office over the years, there’s still a real possibility that there could be a disruption. The areas with serious flooding all around us are having power blackouts this morning and no telling when their power might get back on. So a generator purchase is definitely in my future.

Listening to the news today, there was talk of emergency personnel notifying people that they had 30 minutes to evacuate their houses.  So, next time there is a flood/fire warning in the area I think I will take some time to pack up more than my laptop. Perhaps some other stuff like clothing and medicines that will help us survive and continue to work.

Food and water are also serious considerations. In Florida for hurricane preparedness  they suggest filling up your bathtubs with water or having 1 gallon of water per person per day set aside in case of emergency – didn’t do this last night but should have.  Florida’s family emergency preparedness plan also suggests enough water for 5-7 days.

I think we have enough dry food around the house to sustain us for a number of days (maybe not 7 though). If we consider whats in the freezer and fridge that probably goes up to a couple of weeks or so, assuming we can keep it cold.

Cooking food is another concern. We have propane and camp stoves which would provide rudimentary ability to cook outdoors if necessary as well as an old charcoal grill and bag of charcoal in our car-camping stuff. Which should suffice for a couple of days but probably not a week.

As for important documents they are in that safety deposit box in our flood plain. (May need to rethink that). Wills and other stuff are also in the hands of appropriate family members and lawyers so that’s taken care of.

Another item on their list of things to have for a hurricane is flashlights and fresh batteries. These are all available in our camping stuff but would be difficult to access in a moments notice. So a couple of rechargeable flashlights that were easier to access might be a reasonable investment. The Florida plan further suggests you have a battery operated radio. I happen to have an old one upstairs with the batteries removed – just need to make sure to have some fresh batteries around someplace.

They don’t mention gassing up your car. But we do that as a matter of course anytime harsh weather is forecast.

I think this is about it for now. Probably other stuff I didn’t think of. I have a few fresh fire extinguishers around the home/office but have no pumps. May need to add that to the list…

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Comments?

Photo Credits: September 12 [2013], around 4:30pm [Water in Smiley Creek – Boulder Flood]

 

 

Enterprise file synch

Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)
Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

Last fall at SNW in San Jose there were a few vendors touting enterprise file synchronization services each having a slightly different version of the requirements.   The one that comes most readily to mind was Egnyte which supported file synchronization across a hybrid cloud (public cloud and network storage) which we discussed in our Fall SNWUSA wrap up post last year.

The problem with BYOD

With bring your own devices (BYOD) corporate end users are quickly abandoning any pretense of IT control and turning consumer class file synchronization services to help  synch files across desktop, laptop and all mobile devices they haul around.   But the problem with these solutions such as DropBoxBoxOxygenCloud and others are that they are really outside of IT’s control.

Which is why there’s a real need today for enterprise class file synchronization solutions that exhibit the ease of use and set up available from consumer file synch systems but  offer IT security, compliance and control over the data that’s being moved into the cloud and across corporate and end user devices.

EMC Syncplicity and EMC on premises storage

Last week EMC announced an enterprise version of their recently acquired Syncplicity software that supports on-premises Isilon or Atmos storage, EMC’s own cloud storage offering.

In previous versions of Syncplicity storage was based in the cloud and used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud orchestration and AWS S3 for cloud storage. With the latest release, EMC adds on premises storage to host user file synchronization services that can span mobile devices, laptops and end user desktops.

New Syncplicity users must download desktop client software to support file synchronization or mobile apps for mobile device synchronization.  After that it’s a simple matter of identifying which if any directories and/or files are to be synchronized with the cloud and/or shared with others.

However, with the Business (read enterprise) edition one also gets the Security and Compliance console which supports access control to define users and devices that can synchronize or share data, enforce data retention policies, remote wipe corporate data,  and native support for single sign services. In addition, one also gets centralized user and group management services to grant, change, revoke user and group access to data.  Also, one now obtains enterprise security with AES-256 data-at-rest encryption, separate key manager data centers and data storage data centers, quadruple replication of data for high disaster fault tolerance and SAS70 Type II compliant data centers.

If the client wants to use on premises storage, they would also need to deploy a VM virtual appliance somewhere in the data center to act as the gateway to file synchronization service requests. The file synch server would also presumably need access to the on premises storage and it’s unclear if the virtual appliance is in-band or out-of-band (see discussion on Egnyte’s solution options below).

Egnyte’s solution

Egnyte comes as a software only solution building a file server in the cloud for end user  storage. It also includes an Egnyte app for mobile hardware and the ever present web file browser.  Desktop file access is provided via mapped drives which access the Egnyte cloud file server gateway running as a virtual appliance.

One major difference between Syncplicity and Egnyte is that Egnyte offers a combination of both cloud and on premises storage but you cannot have just on premises storage. Syncplicity only offers one or the other storage for file data, i.e., file synchronization data can only be in the cloud or on local on premises storage but cannot be in both locations.

The other major difference is that Egnyte operates with just about anybody’s NAS storage such as EMC, IBM, and HDS for the on premises file storage.  It operates as an in-band, software appliance solution that traps file activity going to your on premises storage. In this case, one would need to start using a new location or directory for data to be synchronized or shared.

But for NetApp storage only (today), they utilize ONTAP APIs to offer out-of-band file synchronization solutions.  This means that you can keep NetApp data where it resides and just enable synchronization/shareability services for the NetApp file data in current directory locations.

Egnyte promises enterprise class data security with AD, LDAP and/or SSO user authentication, AES-256 data encryption and their own secure data centers.  No mention of separate key security in their literature.

As for cloud backend storage, Egnyte has it’s own public cloud or supports other cloud storage providers such as AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, NetApp Storage Grid and HP Public Cloud.

There’s more to Egnyte’s solution than just file synchronization and sharing but that’s the subject of today’s post. Perhaps we can cover them at more length in a future post if their interest.

File synchronization, cloud storage’s killer app?

The nice thing about these capabilities is that now IT staff can re-gain control over what is and isn’t synched and shared across multiple devices.  Up until now all this was happening outside the data center and external to IT control.

From Egnyte’s perspective, they are seeing more and more enterprises wanting data both on premises for performance and compliance as well as in the cloud storage for ubiquitous access.  They feel its both a sharability demand between an enterprise’s far flung team members and potentially client/customer personnel as well as a need to access, edit and propagate silo’d corporate information using new mobile devices that everyone has these days.

In any event, Enterprise file synchronization and sharing is emerging as one of the killer apps for cloud storage.  Up to this point cloud gateways made sense for SME backup or disaster recovery solutions but IMO, didn’t really take off beyond that space.  But if you can package a robust and secure file sharing and synchronization solution around cloud storage then you just might have something that enterprise customers are clamoring for.

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