News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Bup – towards the perfect backup by cperciva on Monday November 17, 2014 @08:40PM (#8621957)
Tarsnap splits data into context-dependent chunks, then compares them via their hashes to figure out what new data needs to be uploaded.
Re:Bup – towards the perfect backup by jlebar on Tuesday November 18, 2014 @12:37AM (#8622534)
This is interesting, because the size of a file's encrypted chunks now leaks information about the file's plaintext. I suppose you have some minimum chunk size, and that's one way to keep from leaking too much information as a fraction of the overall file size. But if a file is modified many times, it seems to me that you'd have to be very careful not to leak a substantial amount of data to a clever attacker.

Have you thought about how to quantify this tradeoff?

I suppose you could pad each encrypted chunk so they're all the same size, but then if you don't want to waste a ton of space you'd have to restrict your chunking algorithm to output chunks with relatively similar sizes, at which point you lose some of the benefits of chunking.

Re:Bup – towards the perfect backup by cperciva on Tuesday November 18, 2014 @01:43AM (#8622717)
The chunking is done using parameters generated from a secret key, and I haven't been able to see any way for it to be computationally feasible to extract meaningful information from the resulting block sizes.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible, of course; just that it would require someone smarter than me. ;-)