[FDE] Globalization trends

[Robert Jueneman]

Allen, your points are very well taken.  I gave a short intro to a panel
discussion at the Data Protection Summit last month, entitled "the 21st
Century - the End of Recorded History?" that was along the same lines
you have raised.

On the one hand, I worry that the strength of our encryption may not be
good enough to protect Personally Identifiable Information for the
duration of a (young) person's life.  But I also worry that the
encryption will be too strong, and that historians will not be able to
decrypt the data being collected today - assuming the media survives,
and that anyone can find the needle in the haystack, without adding more
hay in the process.

If no one knows what is stored, or where it is located, it is unlikely
that someone will be willing to continue to pay to preserve the data,
and our history will be lost forever.

These are all problems that HAVE to be solved.  I have personally gone
from around 500 GB to over 12 terabytes of data storage in the last four
months, just to have an adequate backup for my ever-expanding collection
of digital photographs. And synchronizing only 6GB (three days of
pictures) for offline backup over the Internet is projected to take over
10 hours.

Bob

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:59:38 -0700
From: Allen <netsecurity at sound-by-design.com>
Subject: [FDE] This is sideways, but...
To: fde at www.xml-dev.com, Cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com>,
	ekmi <ekmi at lists.oasis-open.org>
Message-ID: <4806E74A.4010708 at sound-by-design.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Hi gang(s),

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q

Well worth a quick look and it raises interesting points by 
implication: if the amount of data is increasing at the rate they 
allege: A) how will storage space keep up, B) how will finding 
what you need keep up, C) how will encryption keep up, D) how 
will encryption key management keep up? And these are just a few 
of the potential questions.

As to A), from what I see storage space is not increasing as fast 
as data speeds - 6 month cycle v. 18 month cycle - so we may wind 
up discarding history in real-time. Future historians will hate 
it much worse than the change from film to video for TV news. It 
also means that history will truly be written by the last one 
standing. I actually have a funny story from the early days of FM 
album rock where I lived the history and what is written about it 
is wrong, but there is no way to correct the misstatements now 
given how many wrong versions are out there. Look at the 
recycling of urban myths as an another example. I'm lucky because 
I'm skeptical so I don't often get caught but good friends who 
"should" know better get caught about once a week or so.

As to B), I don't know about you, but I'm finding it harder to 
find some kinds of data than I was 3 or 4 years ago. I have to go 
much further down the stack and the failure rate is higher. To 
give an obscure example, I was trying to remember the name of the 
Catholic heresy from about the 11th or 12th century in Spain that 
is depicted in Luis Bunuel's film, "Milky Way." After working on 
it for a couple of hours and shooting off e-mails to "experts" I 
just gave up on the net and tracked down an old VHS tape of the 
film to re-watch. Haven't gotten it yet, but it is on order.

Also finding the exact quote in the morass of e-mail and other 
files sometimes turns out to be a nightmare as the search tools 
aren't good enough for mere mortals such as I.

As to C) I suspect we can keep up here, but the length of 
protection will be far shorter than we think because of the need 
to control the data to ensure that no copies are laying around 
that can be brute forced.

And D) gives me nightmares. All I can see is the basket of keys 
my parents collected that they had no clue as to what they fit. 
My basket is smaller, but I still have one.

May your nightmares never survive sunrise,

Allen


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End of FDE Digest, Vol 19, Issue 6
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