[dropped tahoe-dev from Cc:] On Thursday,2009-08-06, at 17:08 , james hughes wrote:

Until you reach the threshold, you do not have the information to attack. It becomes information theoretic secure.

This is true for information-theoretically secure secret sharing, but not true for Cleversafe's technique of composing an All-Or-Nothing- Transform with Reed-Solomon erasure coding.

CleverSafe can not provide any security guarantees unless these questions can be answered. Without answers, CleverSafe is neither Clever nor Safe.

Hey, let's be nice. Cleversafe has implemented a storage system which integrates encryption in the attempt to make it safer. They GPL at least some of their work [*], and they publish their ideas and engage in discussion about them. These are all good things. My remaining disagreements with them are like this: 1. (The important one.) I don't think the access control policy of "whoever can access at least K of the N volumes of data" is the access control policy that I want. For one thing, it immediately leads to the questions that James Hughes was asking, about who is authorized to access what servers. For another thing, I would really like my access control policy to be fine-grained, flexible, and dynamic. So for example, I'd like to be able to give you access two three of my files but not all my other files, and I'd like you to then be able to give your friend access to two of those files but not the third. See Brian Warner's and Jason Resch's discussion of these issues: [1, 2]. 2. Cleversafe seems to think that their scheme gives better-than- computational security, i.e. that it guarantees security even if AES-256 is crackable. This is wrong, but it is an easy mistake to make! Both Ben Laurie and James Hughes have jumped to the conclusion (in this thread) that the Cleversafe K-out-of-N encoding has the same information-theoretic security that secret-sharing K-out-of-N encoding has. 3. Cleversafe should really tone down the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about today's encryption being mincemeat for tomorrow's cryptanalysts. It might turn out to be true, but if so it will be due to cryptanalytic innovations more than due to Moore's Law. And it might not turn out like that -- perhaps AES-256 will remain safe for centuries. Also, Cleversafe's product is not more secure than any other product against this threat. It is hard to explain to non-cryptographers how much they can rely on the security of cryptographic schemes. It's very complicated, and most schemes deployed have failed due to flaws in the surrounding system, engineering errors or key management (i.e. access control) problems. Nobody knows what cryptanalytic techniques will be invented in the future. My opinion is that relying on well- engineered strong encryption to protect your data is at least as safe alternatives such as keeping the data on your home computer or on your corporate server. The Cleversafe FUD doesn't help people understand the issues better. Regards, Zooko [1] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2009-July/002482.html [2] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2009-August/002514.html [*] Somebody stated on a mailing list somewhere that Cleversafe has applied for patents. Therefore, if you want to use their work under the terms of the GPL, you should also be aware that if their patents are granted then some of what you do may be subject to the patents. Of course, this is always true of any software (the techniques might be patented), but I thought it was worth mentioning since in this case the company authoring the software is also the company applying for patents. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE