First encrypted online backup service?

[John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>]

Actually it looks like they're set up for modem access, but I
presume that if there's any serious demand they'd do it over the Internet.

Of course, Would You Trust Your Backups To This Man?  If the random
key generated for it was later found to be not random enough, or if
any of a dozen other bugs or breakthroughs make the encryption
penetrable, would you want to have transmitted every bit of data in
your computer, to a site you don't know very well, and to all
interested eavesdroppers?  Using proprietary and unverified software?
Or even using free software?

Maybe some reliable cypherpunk should run such a service.  Examine
what comes through and gets written on tape.  Superencipher it
yourself before writing it on tape, and keep your own keys securely;
maybe with a secret sharing scheme, and a tree of keys that requires
going offline to other backup tapes to recover the key for a
particular backup tape.  And as you look at your customers' data,
remember Robert Morris's #1 piece of advice to cryptanalysts: "Look
for plaintext".  It shows up in the darnedest places where it
shouldn't.  A c'punk backup service would warn you if you tried to
push plaintext into it.  Though it'd store it for you regardless: the
customer might care a lot more about being able to retain a copy of
their data than they care about whether anyone else could see it.

I hope they find a market and some workable solutions to these issues.
It'd be nice to have automatic backups of my data kept securely in a
few spots around the globe for some reasonable price.

	John Gilmore

Forwarded-by: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>
From: Alan Brown <abrown@usaor.net>
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.news
Subject: Protect your computer data with remote tape backup.
Date: 13 Mar 1996 01:37:12 GMT
Organization: National Computer Company
Message-ID: <4i58s8$r65@news.usaor.net>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1 (Windows; U; 16bit)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

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