You can encrypt them at rest, but data that lies encrypted and is never touched, is useless data. You need to decrypt them as well. Also, plenty of incompetent devops around, and writing a decryption toolchain can be difficult.

Am I missing something? If you ever need to use this data, obviously you transfer it back to your premises and then decrypt it. Whether it's stored at Amazon or North Korean Government Cloud makes no difference whatsoever if you encrypt before and decrypt after transfer.

They can take the data hostage, the foreign nation would have no recourse.

Have it in multiple countries with multiple providers if money isn't a concern.

And are we forgetting that they can literally have a multi cloud backup setup in their own country as well or incentivize companies to build their datacenters there in partnership with them of sorts with a multi cloud setup as I said earlier?

Encryption only protects data for an unknown period of time, not indefinately.

If your threat model includes the TLA types, then backup to a physical server you control in a location geographically isolated from your main location. Or to a local set of drives that you physically rotate to remote locations.

Decryption is not usually an issue if you encrypt locally.

Tools like Kopia, Borg and Restic handle this and also include deduplication and other advanced features.

Really no excuse for large orgs or even small businesses and somewhat tech literate public.

Why write one when there are tools like “restic”?

Is encryption, almost any form, really reliable protection for a countries' government entire data? I mean, this is _the_ ultimate playground for "state level actors" -- if someday there's a hole and it turns out it takes only 20 years to decrypt the data with a country-sized supercomputer, you can bet _this_ is what multiple alien countries will try to decrypt first.

You're assuming that this needs to protect...

> ... a countries' government entire data?

But the bulk of the data is "boring": important to individuals, but not state security ("sorry Jiyeong, the computer doesn't know if you are a government employee. Apologies if you have rent to make this month!")

There likely exists data where the risk calculation ends up differently, so that you wouldn't store it in this system. For example, for nuke launch codes, they might rather lose than loose them. Better to risk having to reset and re-arm them than to have them hijacked

> Is encryption, [in?] any form, really reliable protection

There's always residual risk. E.g.: can you guarantee that every set of guards that you have watching national datacenters is immune from being bribed?

Copying data around on your own territory thus also carries risks, but you cannot get around it if you want backups for (parts of) the data

People in this thread are discussing specific cryptographic primitives that they think are trustworthy, which I think goes a bit deeper than makes sense here. Readily evident is that there are ciphers trusted by different governments around the world for their communication and storage, and that you can layer them such that all need to be broken before arriving at the plain, original data. There is also evidence in the Snowden archives that (iirc) e.g. PGP could not be broken by the NSA at the time. Several ciphers held up for the last 25+ years and are not expected to be broken by quantum computers either. All of these sources can be drawn upon to arrive at a solid choice for an encryption scheme

A foreign gov getting all your security researchers and staff's personal info with their family and tax and medical records doesn't sound great.

That's just from the top of my head. Exploiting such a trove of data doesn't sound complicated.

Yeah that ignores about two thirds of my point

I'm in agreement with your second point, I think moving data in the country isn't trivial either and requires a pretty strong system. I just don't have much to say on that side, so didn't comment on it.

You and I can encrypt our data before saving it into the cloud, because we have nothing of value or interest to someone with the resources of a state.

Sometimes sensitive data at the government level has a pretty long shelf life; you may want it to remain secret in 30, 50, 70 years.

I don't see how this is any different than countries putting significant portions of their gold & currency reserves in the NY Federal Reserve Bank. If for some reason the U.S. just decided to declare "Your monies are all mine now" the effects would be equally if not more devastating than a data breach.

Exactly that happened to Russia, Iran, Venezuela

Not North Korea though; they just have hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid parking tickets invested in the USA, which is a negative.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/north-korea-parking-ti... [2017]

The difference is that there are sometimes options to recover the money, and at least other countries will see and know that this happened, and may take some action.

A data breach, however, is completely secret - both from you and from others. Another country (not even necessarily the one that is physically hosting your data) may have access to your data, and neither you nor anyone else would necessarily know.