SpyCloud: Intelligence is going to keep its secrets in the clouds

Dropbox for files, Google for mail, iCloud, well ... for everything else!
The average citizen has all the options for storing his information in the "cloud". Now, spies want the same thing. Soon, all the secrets of our country can be stored in a “fairly cloudy foggy” form.

In-Q-Tel , the CIA's investment department and the American intelligence community, have recently begun to “melt” money into a cloud storage company called Cleversafe . As stated by the CIA, the platform is ideal for storing critical data, referring to the basic principles of confidentiality, integrity and availability of data. (By the way, these principles were also stated by the CIA).

And these are just one of many new government initiatives to use "cloud services." Since last year, the US administration has adopted a "cloud first" policy (literally "first of all the clouds"), which encourages solutions based on cloud technologies, "whenever a safe, reliable and cost-effective cloud option exists." The Pentagon is already planning to switch to cloud technologies, and the expected “Cloud Computing Act of 2011” (“2011 Cloud Computing Act”) expected in a few weeks may generate even more incentives to invest in cloud technologies.

But this “upward” movement brings with it all sorts of security problems, especially for the CIA, which is still suffering from the recent hacking of their public website . While there was a loud debate about the security of cloud storage against the more traditional forms of storage, Cleversafe was confident that the data would be safe with them. And this is good, because the government would like to prevent “the next Bradley Manning” merging all their secrets into WikiLeaks.
')
Cleversafe CEO Chris Gladwin , a Chicago-based software developer with an emphasis on cryptography, says that the secure method of cloud-based data storage has been known for a long time. First written on 1979 paper, “How to Share a Secret” (“How to Share a Secret”) is quite simple: “Take some information, then pass it through certain mathematical algorithms that divide it into heaps of raw data, meaningless one by one.

Similar to this method, the “information dissemination” technology is used, Cleversafe takes massive amounts of data, chops them into pieces and then distributes storage to different locations, or “storage nodes”. Although the data may be located in four different data centers throughout the country, it can be accessed in real time from “single clouds”. And unlike traditional storage methods, there is no need to make multiple copies of the original data, which saves space and money.

According to Chris Gladwin , there are several other advantages of this type of data storage. Firstly , it is confidentiality; individual pieces of data cannot be decrypted by themselves, even if an outsider has received several such parts. Secondly , it is reliable, even if some of the disks on which one of the pieces rests were damaged, dropped offline, or were simply lost, there is a rather high probability of restoring the entire file from the existing parts. It is unlikely that 10 servers or disks fail at the same time.

In-Q-Tel is confident that Cleversafe "will provide our customers in the intelligence community with powerful distributed data storage facilities that will provide the levels of unsurpassed reliability they require."
Since, allocated in the US, the state budget for IT contains a little bit of 20 billion dollars for the development of cloud technologies, we will see how it is likely that other structures will soon follow in the same direction.