Steven M. Bellovin wrote: > The bigger issue, though, is more subtle: keeping track of the keys > is non-trivial. These need to be backed up, too, and kept separate > from (but synchronized with) the tapes. Worse yet, they need to be > kept secure. That may mean storing the keys with a different > escrow company. A loss of either piece,the tape or the key, renders > the backup useless.
This is correct. It is not that nobody ever thought of encrypting tapes, it is that there has been no uptake on the idea because the management overhead costs outweighed the perceived benefit. The big vendors didn't bother offering it because they didn't think they could make money, and the start-ups who have been trying to fill the gap found the market to be small. Now it is becoming clear that the perceived benefit has been underestimated. There are a number of small companies making products that can encrypt data in a storage infrastructure, including tape backups (full disclosure: I work for one of those companies). The solutions all involve appliances priced in the tens of thousands. The costs come not from encryption (how much does an FPGA cost these days?), but from solving the problems you listed, plus some others you didn't. Now that the benefit of storage encryption is clearer, tape vendors (StorageTek, HP, IBM, etc) are almost certainly looking at adding encryption capability into their offerings. There is an IEEE working group developing interoperability standards for storage encryption, including tape: http://www.siswg.org And in case anyone is really interested in this subject, Networking Computing magazine did a round-up of all the storage infrastructure security solutions currently on the market: http://www.networkcomputing.com/showitem.jhtml?docid=1607f2 Ken --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
