Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

Re:Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system... by jeroenhd on Monday October 06, 2025 @12:51AM (#45487738)

Of course you'd encrypt the data before uploading it to a third party, but there's no reason why that third party should be under control of a foreign government. South Korea has more than one data center they can store data inside of, there's no need to trust other governments sigh every byte of data you've gathered, even if there are no known backdoors or flaws in your encryption mechanism (which I'm sure some governments have been looking into for decades).

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Re:Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system... by yetihehe on Monday October 06, 2025 @02:36AM (#45488265)

There is a reason that NIST recommends new encryption algorithms from time to time. If you get a copy of ALL government data, in 20 years you might be able to break encryption and get access to ALL government data from 20yr ago, no matter how classified they were, if they were stored in that cloud. Such data might still be valuable, because not all data is published after some period.

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Re:Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system... by indolering on Monday October 06, 2025 @03:53AM (#45488766)

That's going away. We are seeing reduced deprecations of crypto algorithms over time AFAICT. The mathematical foundations are becoming better understood and the implementations' assurance levels are improving too. I think we are going up the bathtub curb here.

The value of said data diminishes with time too. You can totally do an off-site cloud backup with mitigation fallbacks should another country become unfriendly. Hell, shard them such that you need n-of-m backups to reconstruct and host each node in a different jurisdiction.

Not that South Korea couldn't have Samsung's Joyent acquisition handle it.

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Re:Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system... by DoctorOetker on Monday October 06, 2025 @08:55AM (#45490861)

I don't consider myself special, anything I can find eventually proof assistants using ML will find...

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Re:Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system... by rstuart4133 on Monday October 06, 2025 @03:33AM (#45488614)

That doesn't sound like a good excuse to me.

aes128 has been the formal standard for 23 years. The only "foreseeable" event that could challenge it is quantum computing. The likely post quantum replacement is ... aes256, which is already a NIST standard. NIST won't replace aes256 in the foreseeable future.

All that aside, there is no shortage of ciphers. If you are worried about one being broken, chain a few of them together.

And finally, no secret has to last forever. Western governments tend to declassify just about everything after 50 years. After 100 everyone involved is well and truly dead.

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Re:Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system... by gregoriol on Monday October 06, 2025 @08:15AM (#45490534)

If you are really paranoid to that point, you probably wouldn't follow NIST recommendations for encryption algorithms as it is part of the Department of Commerce of the United States, even more in today's context.

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Re:Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system... by IAmBroom on Monday October 06, 2025 @10:25AM (#45491803)

The reason is because better ones have been developed, not because the old ones are "broken". Breaking algos is now a matter of computer flops spent, not clever hacks being discovered.

When the flops required to break an algo exceed the energy available on the planet, items are secure beyond any reasonable doubt.

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