Helping pave the way toward cost-effective disaster recovery systems, MCI Communications Corp. this week will join a growing number of providers offering file backup and storage over the Internet. [snip]
MCI and Connected house data on servers at two mirrored sites. Both companies are adding an extra dimension of security over the Internet by encrypting data.
MCI's networkMCI Backup software, for Windows 95 or 3.x, will scan a file for viruses, encrypt it using an RSA Data Security Inc. public key and compress it before it is uploaded onto MCI's Internet backbone network to a secure storage facility, said MCI officials in Atlanta. [snip]
Some comments (off the top of my head):
* What kind of encryption? [The article says RSA. ] How big is the key?
Web page, and sign-up email doesn't say...
* Why encrypt before compression? If the encryption is any good, then the encrypted data won't compress much at all. However, compression before encryption has its own problems.
This is just confusing wording I am sure - marketing/press-release people rarely get the details right. I would guess, that in order it is scanned, compressed, and then encrypted. Nothing else makes sense.
* Who does the key management (if any)? * Does MCI store copies of the keys used? * How does MCI authenticate users who request copies of files, and do they then return them encrypted or as plaintext? If encrypted, how does the recepient decryt the files? (He/she just had a disk crash, and this is their backup medium, remember?)
These are all good questions....
I looked on MCI's web site <http://www.mci.com>, but couldn't find anything. Besides, it's slower than sludge. [ 90 secs/page over my 128K link. :-( ]
http://www.mci.com/productview/framelements/backupindex.shtml (probably need netscape2 for this.) I requested to be a beta-test member and got confirmation email. I guess I'll wait until they contact me "early this summer" and see what their software does.... Dan ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Oelke Alcatel Network Systems droelke@aud.alcatel.com Richardson, TX