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by TimSchumann 2151 days ago
The point I’m trying to get across is that the default viewpoint of many knowledgeable developers I know is ‘Of course AWS can’t see inside my EC2 instance because X’ — where X is some magical technology that doesn't exist.

I don’t want to devolve into audit logs and permissions and multi user key signing and wether they actually do or not.

The statement that ‘they can’t’ is 100% false, full stop. That’s all I’m trying to get across.
1 comments
cameronh90 2151 days ago
The technology to do it does exist likely on hardware you possess. The trusted computed platform lets you build a signed OS that encrypts its data using keys on the TPM. Using this, you could build an S3 implementation that stores customer data, but doesn’t let you access it.

It’s probably not a good idea to make a system with no human fallback, but it IS possible with current, non-magic technology.

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discodave 2151 days ago
The reality is that groups of people inside AWS have access to your stuff. A given person might only be on the S3 or EC2 team... but each of those teams can ssh to hosts in production, or has other access that could be used to compromise your data.

Amazon does take privacy and security very seriously, but these systems are run by people. Attacks like the recent Twitter attack could work for various AWS services.

Source: I used to work in EC2 Networking.

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jjeaff 2151 days ago
Are you sure about that? Most of the aws provided S3 sdks include the option of client side encryption. Not to mention that there are plenty of third party options for that as well. AWS could I guess look at your s3 data, but it will just look like gibberish.
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mapgrep 2151 days ago
I think it’s pretty clear the person you are responding to is not suggesting AWS can magically break encryption, but rather that they “have access to your stuff” that is actually on AWS. There are plenty of AWS customers running data through, or storing data on, AWS that is sensitive in the form it is in on AWS. If you have an rdbms (database) actively running on AWS for example it is not e2e encrypted. If you are terminating a customer TLS connection on an ec2 hosted web server their web form upload is exposed to that machine. Etc etc.
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