Cloud Storage (by alaric)

Currently, you can go to various providers and buy online storage capacity (IMHO, rsync.net is best, after research I did to find an offsite backup host for work). It's more expensive than a hard disk in your computer, and miles slower, but it has one brilliant advantage: it's remote. So it's perfect for backups.

And that's the heart of a free market - storage is cheap to the cloud providers (they just buy disks, and in bulk at that), but their storage has more value to you than your own storage because of it's remoteness. So they can rent it to you at a markup, and you get a benefit, and everyone is happy. Money flows, the economy grows, and one day we'll get to have affordable space tourism et cetera.

But large, centralised, cloud storage providers are attractive targets for people who want to steal data. They become centralised points of failure; if they go bankrupt, lots of people lose their backups. Therefore, it's smart to do your backups to more than one of them, just in case. But that means setting up your systems to talk to each one's interfaces, arranging payment and agreeing to terms and conditions with them all individually, and so on.

Surely this state of affairs can be improved? With ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY?

Well, I think it can, and here's how. Read more »

Lords of a new economy (by alaric)

Pondering Bitcoin, I recently opined:

Who sets the difficulty of the puzzle and all that? The computers in the network do - when the system was created, rules were agreed, and written into the software. As everyone runs software following those rules, anybody solving easier puzzles or trying to award themselves more bounty for doing so will have their bounty-claiming transaction rejected as invalid. To loosen the rules, a majority of the computers in the system will all need to accept the new rules - so it will require consensus from the community.

I've been thinking more about this. Read more »

Bitcoin security (by alaric)

I've been learning about Bitcoin lately.

It's an electronic currency. I've seen electronic currency before - in the late 90s there were efforts to create them based on virtual banks issuing coins. The coins were basically long random serial numbers which, along with a statement of the value of the coin, were then signed by the bank. The public key of the bank is published, so people can check they're valid coins issued by the bank. The idea was that rather than withdrawing a bunch of notes from the bank, you can ask the bank to mint you a bunch of these signed numbers instead; and anyone who sees them can check their value, and eventually, return them to the bank (which can also check their value in the same way) to get their account credited.

Read more »

The UK MoD Manual of Security has been leaked (by alaric)

The UK MoD Manual of Security has appeared on WikiLeaks.

I'm not certain this is a good thing, to be honest... the intelligence services are renowned for overstepping their mark, and I'm sure the sections on dealing with investigative journalists and the like will be useful to those who fight against that kind of thing, but I suspect the bits about dealing with foreign intelligence agencies would probably have best been kept secret. Still, the cat is out of the bag, so perhaps it's no bad thing if the MoD are forced to have a total security audit and overhaul their manual 🙂

I've not managed to download it - WikiLeaks servers seem to be rather busy - but the front page does have some interesting snippets from the sections about visitors to China and Russia, discussing the kinds of things the local intelligence agencies do to try and extract Western commercial and military secrets.

This has some interesting bearing on the growing tendency to outsource software development tasks to developing countries. I know a lot of this work does go to China, and so we can probably assume that any intellectual property made available to developers in China is probably scrutinised by their security services and passed on to Chinese companies that may be able to benefit from it.

In the depths of my career history, I once worked on a software system that was to be used in a Government project to protect the nation's "critical national infrastructure"; and I gather that another part of the system was outsourced to an Indian development team. I'm not sure if the client was actually made aware of this, but at the time, I felt concerned that national security might be threatened by this.

n2n revisited (by alaric)

I have spoken before about n2n, the peer-to-peer VPN tool that makes it easy to create efficient virtual networks.

Normal VPN products are really more of a "virtual private cable" than a "virtual private network" - they just establish a point-to-point link over the Internet, requiring a login to set it up and encrypting the traffic. This means you can have a virtual connection to a real private network somewhere; and if a few people connect into that network via VPN links, then there really is a virtual private network between you all, but all going through a central point where all your links meet.

While with n2n, everyone connects to a shared "supernode" that keeps a list of who is connected to the VPN, and from where; then when you want to connect to somebody else, you use the list from the supernode to establish a direct encrypted connection between yourself and them, rather than going through any central point. So it's an actual virtual network out of the box. You can even have more than one supernode running, so that any one can fail; all the supernode does is to provide the directory service.

Also, you don't need to maintain a database of user logins; a supernode can carry any number of virtual networks. When you connect to the supernode, you just tell it the name of the community you want to join, and it will share your connection details with anybody else in the same community - you can make communities up on the fly rather than needing to maintain a central list. Access control is handled by the simple fact that you need to know the correct encryption key for the community you want to join, or your messages will be received garbled by everyone else, and ignored.

Anyway, for a long time, I wanted to get into n2n, but I couldn't as it didn't compile out of the box on NetBSD; but a desire for a better VPN solution at work has led to me getting it working. It wasn't that much work, in the end, as the existing FreeBSD support already had a BSD approach to things.

n2n is distributed via Subversion, so they don't have version tarballs - this is a problem for my NetBSD port. So I decided to mirror it into git with git svn, then forked it as "Kitten n2n", made my NetBSD port, tagged a release, pushed it to github, uploaded a tarball from that tag, and then made a NetBSD package of net/kitten-n2n.

I'll tinker with it for a few more days, then I'll submit it to the NetBSD folks for consideration.

I'll keep pulling in from the official n2n Subversion repo, to pull down patches, and I'll see if they'd like my patches pushed up - as well as NetBSD support, there's a few things I'd like to fix as well (I've spotted passing an integer through a void* by casting, which is slightly dodgy practice and produces warnings on my 64-bit machine, but is easily fixed by passing a pointer to a heap-allocated copy of the integer!)