[kspacewalk2]

>As a government you should not be putting your stuff in an environment under control of some other nation, period.

Why? If you encrypt it yourself before transfer, the only possible control some_other_nation will have over you or your data is availability.

[shakna]

You're forgetting that you're talking nation states, here. Breaking encryption is in fact the role of the people you are giving access.

Sovereign delivery makes sense for _nations_.

[bombcar]

You can use and abuse encrypted one time pads and multiple countries to guarantee it’s not retrievable.

[NegativeK]

Using a OTP in your backup strategy adds way more complexity, failure modes, and costs with literally no improvement in your situation.

[makeitdouble]

You're assuming a level of competency that's hard to warrant at this point.

[Imustaskforhelp]

If your threat model is this high that you assume encryption breaking to be into your threat model, then maybe you do need a level of comeptency in the process as well.

They have 2 Trillion $ economy. I am sure that competency shouldn't be the thing that they should be worrying at that scale but at the same time I know those 2 trillion $ don't really make them more competent but I just want to share that it was very possible for them to teach/learn the competency

Maybe this incident teaches us atleast something. Definitely something to learn here though. I am interested in how the parent comment suggests sharing one time pad or rather a practical way for them to do so I suppose since I am genuinely curious as most others refer to using the cloud like aws etc. and I am not sure how much they can share something like one time pad and at the scale of petabytes and more, I can maybe understand it but I would love if the GP can tell me a practical way of doing so to atleast have more safety I suppose than encryption methods I suppose..

[makeitdouble]

I think it doesn't need to be the encryption breaking per se.

It could be a gov laptop with the encryption keys left at a bar. Or the wrong keys saved on the system and the backups can't actually be decrypted. Or the keys being reused at large scale and leaked/guessed from lower security area. etc.

Relying on encryption requires operation knowledge and discipline. At some point, a base level of competency is required anyway, I'm not just sure encryption would have saved them as much as we'd wish it would.

To your point, I'd assume high profile incidents like this one will put more pressure to do radical changes, and in particular to treat digital data as a more critical asset that you can't hand down to the crookest corrupt entity willy nilly just for the kickback.

South Korea doesn't lack competent people, but hiring them and letting them at the helm sounds like a tough task.

[littlestymaar]

First of all, you cannot do much if you keep all the data encrypted on the cloud (basically just backing things up, and hope you don't have to fetch it given the egress cost). Also, availability is exactly the kind of issue that a fire cause…

[_2d30]

Yeah backups would’ve been totally useless in this case. All South Korea could’ve done is restore their data from the backups and avoid data loss.

[littlestymaar]

What part of the incident did you miss: the problem here was that they didn't backup in the first place.

You don't need the Cloud for backups, and there's no reason to believe that they would have backuped their data while using the cloud more than what they did with their self-hosting…