Tag Archives: business of security

Amazon Has Trucks Filled with Hard Drives and an Armed Guard

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/amazon-has-trucks-filled-with-hard-drives-and-an-armed-guard.html

From an interview with an Amazon Web Services security engineer:

So when you use AWS, part of what you’re paying for is security.

Right; it’s part of what we sell. Let’s say a prospective customer comes to AWS. They say, “I like pay-as-you-go pricing. Tell me more about that.” We say, “Okay, here’s how much you can use at peak capacity. Here are the savings we can see in your case.”

Then the company says, “How do I know that I’m secure on AWS?” And this is where the heat turns up. This is where we get them. We say, “Well, let’s take a look at what you’re doing right now and see if we can offer a comparable level of security.” So they tell us about the setup of their data centers.

We say, “Oh my! It seems like we have level five security and your data center has level three security. Are you really comfortable staying where you are?” The customer figures, not only am I going to save money by going with AWS, I also just became aware that I’m not nearly as secure as I thought.

Plus, we make it easy to migrate and difficult to leave. If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don’t want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data.

What? How do you do that?

We have a product called Snowmobile. It’s a gas-guzzling truck. There are no public pictures of the inside, but it’s pretty cool. It’s like a modular datacenter on wheels. And customers rightly expect that if they load a truck with all their data, they want security for that truck. So there’s an armed guard in it at all times.

It’s a pretty easy sell. If a customer looks at that option, they say, yeah, of course I want the giant truck and the guy with a gun to move my data, not some crappy system that I develop on my own.

Lots more about how AWS views security, and Keith Alexander’s position on Amazon’s board of directors, in the interview.

Found on Slashdot.

The Legal Risks of Security Research

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/10/the-legal-risks-of-security-research.html

Sunoo Park and Kendra Albert have published “A Researcher’s Guide to Some Legal Risks of Security Research.”

From a summary:

Such risk extends beyond anti-hacking laws, implicating copyright law and anti-circumvention provisions (DMCA §1201), electronic privacy law (ECPA), and cryptography export controls, as well as broader legal areas such as contract and trade secret law.

Our Guide gives the most comprehensive presentation to date of this landscape of legal risks, with an eye to both legal and technical nuance. Aimed at researchers, the public, and technology lawyers alike, its aims both to provide pragmatic guidance to those navigating today’s uncertain legal landscape, and to provoke public debate towards future reform.

Comprehensive, and well worth reading.

Here’s a Twitter thread by Kendra.