[discodave]

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.

[jjeaff]

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.

[mapgrep]

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.