It is if there is some central root user for the whole thing. I doubt they'd be dumb enough to do that, however.

Just brainstorming, but at this scale, you could have a separate encryption network built in to the hardware so that users request data only in gigabyte blocks, then read it on hardware that asynchronously requests the key and does JIT decryption via a secure network that IS locked down in the Pentagon somewhere. Hell, it could even be airgapped and just hire a grunt to walk to a file cabinet each time to unlock it. So that even if you exfiltrated their whole datacenter, you'd have nothing without the keys (that's a given regardless).

The keys could be hot-rotating so that if the key center was hacked (and they detected it), they could shut off the cloud, re encrypt everything with new backup keys, and keep running.

But that's sci-fi level shit. In all likelihood it's some crappy instance of azure outsourced to Bozo Hamilton

> It is if there is some central root user for the whole thing. I doubt they'd be dumb enough to do that, however.

I wouldn't be certain of that...

"Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-...

>I doubt they'd be dumb enough to do that, however.

Me too, I think it will be due to a toxic brew of stupidity, hubris, and incompetence, rather than just being dumb.

Alternatively, this allows better defense, rather than everyone and their grandmother having to run their own setup.

It is a single point, but also allows defenders to focus their efforts.