Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing
-
Because fog isn't basically a cloud squashed against the ground where you can touch it and get dirt in it....
Unfortunately the actual paper is behind a paywall, but here's the abstract:
Regulatory and technological aspects of cloud technology are showing both opportunities and gaps in the rules on security and accessibility. Our proposal aims at addressing a problem that has not yet manifested using a protocol and discussing the normative aspects regarding the possibility of rendering a document completely immaterial. Our article proposes a protocol that uses the network in an unconventional way to make a document fully immaterial. By immaterial we mean that is not localisable anywhere in its entirety. If we continue the analogy to climate, we want to realise a fog of files rather than a cloud. The files are distributed on a public or private network and only the injectors and extractors can access them. The inaccessibility by others, the non-location, and the dynamics of the system offer significant advantages in terms of security but raise some legal problems.
-
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Our proposal aims at addressing a problem that has not yet manifested
Did write this sentence? It appears to be a curious method of offhandedly saying "We're creating a solution in search of a problem". Also, the "using a protocol" immediately after the part I quoted is incredibly awkwardly placed. And then the rest of the sentence devolves into buzzword soup that appears to be all about hipster ego stroking.
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
By immaterial we mean that is not localisable anywhere in its entirety
So instead of grabbing whole files, you just grab packets, and as long as you do it long enough, you'll have enough pieces of various puzzles to be useful.
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
If we continue the analogy to climate, we want to realise a fog of files rather than a cloud. The files are distributed on a public or private network and only the injectors and extractors can access them.
I think if we continue the analogy to climate, what you want to realize is a bunch of clouds of files rather than a single cloud of files. A cloud of clouds, if you will.
-
They compare the system to a letter with a secure tracking device that gets sent continuously between different post offices and is never delivered. It would be hard for a thief to find it, but when you need it again you simply activate the tracking device, and it can then be easily located.
The "never delivered" part is the key part of the analogy that they've left unaddressed here. They seem to think that packets can somehow exist in the space between nodes, which makes no God-damned sense, and sounds like the topic of a really awful sci-fi novel. The analogy is also bullshit anyway, because the letter is whole and not in several pieces. To use their analogy, this is like saying that your mail is safer ripped apart in 8 pieces sitting in 8 separate mail trucks which are continuously driving around the United States. Which is perhaps true, but if a single one of those trucks don't make it, you can't make use of the letter (let's say the letter is a legally binding contract that needs to have all of its pieces to make the analogy complete) not to mention your speed on getting that letter is now only as fast as the slowest truck.
Also, your supposedly more-secure security system is now only as secure as the server hosting the keys which tell you where all the packets are, which would amount to the same problem. But who knows? Maybe they have some ingenious way of solving that problem. I'm not going to pay to find out.
-
@CrazyEyes said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
They compare the system to a letter with a secure tracking device that gets sent continuously between different post offices and is never delivered. It would be hard for a thief to find it, but when you need it again you simply activate the tracking device, and it can then be easily located.
The "never delivered" part is the key part of the analogy that they've left unaddressed here. They seem to think that packets can somehow exist in the space between nodes, which makes no God-damned sense, and sounds like the topic of a really awful sci-fi novel. The analogy is also bullshit anyway, because the letter is whole and not in several pieces. To use their analogy, this is like saying that your mail is safer ripped apart in 8 pieces sitting in 8 separate mail trucks which are continuously driving around the United States. Which is perhaps true, but if a single one of those trucks don't make it, you can't make use of the letter (let's say the letter is a legally binding contract that needs to have all of its pieces to make the analogy complete) not to mention your speed on getting that letter is now only as fast as the slowest truck.
Also, your supposedly more-secure security system is now only as secure as the server hosting the keys which tell you where all the packets are, which would amount to the same problem. But who knows? Maybe they have some ingenious way of solving that problem. I'm not going to pay to find out.Yeah I'd be incredibly leery of trusting this filestore. I'm sure they have some sort of RAID (Agent Orange?) that will make it all better™, but still. You could also just use per-file encryption.
-
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
we want to realise a fog of files rather than a cloud.
ALSO, they don't even fucking know what "the cloud" is. "the cloud" isn't a bunch of files, it's a bunch of servers. They're trying to incept the abstraction another layer and abstract away the individual files in addition to already having abstracted away the individual servers by virtue of operating on the cloud. While I won't say it's a completely terrible idea outright, there are generally easier and more resource efficient ways of improving cloud security.
-
@Fox said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
we want to realise a fog of files rather than a cloud.
ALSO, they don't even fucking know what "the cloud" is. "the cloud" isn't a bunch of files, it's a bunch of servers. They're trying to incept the abstraction another layer and abstract away the individual files in addition to already having abstracted away the individual servers by virtue of operating on the cloud. While I won't say it's a completely terrible idea outright, there are generally easier and more resource efficient ways of improving cloud security.
Servers are so 2015. Serverless is the new norm ( ).
-
This idea, "let's make a big distributed network that anyone can dump files into and read later", has been proposed dozens of times but no one can manage to make it work.
Because, as it turns out, disk space is not actually free.
Although... I'm pretty sure you could make it work today with bitcoin. As long as you pay nodes to host data.
-
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Regulatory and technological aspects of cloud technology are showing both opportunities and gaps in the rules on security and accessibility. Our proposal aims at addressing a problem that has not yet manifested using a protocol and discussing the normative aspects regarding the possibility of rendering a document completely immaterial. Our article proposes a protocol that uses the network in an unconventional way to make a document fully immaterial. By immaterial we mean that is not localisable anywhere in its entirety. If we continue the analogy to climate, we want to realise a fog of files rather than a cloud. The files are distributed on a public or private network and only the injectors and extractors can access them. The inaccessibility by others, the non-location, and the dynamics of the system offer significant advantages in terms of security but raise some legal problems.
Waaait... Are they describing Tor used for file storage, only done poorly?
-
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
here's the abstract
That's the most terrible abstract I've read in quite a while. Was it written by someone with a humanities degree and no clue about what they're talking about? It sounds a lot like the BS that sociology academics seem to get the hots for.
Anyway, if what they're doing is storing data by encrypting it, breaking it up into lots of overlapping segments (except you'd need to also do clever slicing), and then spreading those all over, that could work. Stupidly inefficient, but actually fairly robust to most classes of attacks, as you'd need to lose a lot to be unable to recover yet the attacker would need to capture a lot to be able to reconstruct.
-
I may be daft, but
question: why do people call it 'the cloud' anyways? like how did the analogy originate
thanks,
bb36e
-
@bb36e I always thought it was from where a cloud was used in network diagrams to represent a part of a network which wasn't relevant to the diagram. Wikipedia has some other suggestions.
*shrug*
-
@bb36e said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
why do people call it 'the cloud' anyways?
Probably comes from when some marketingdroid saw a picture made by networking, where the complexity of how packets are routed over the internet was replaced with a cloud of nebulous complexity-hiding. That was a pretty common thing back before Cloud Computing was a thing.
Which is about what @loopback0 said…
-
@JBert said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Waaait... Are they describing Tor used for file storage, only done poorly?
Yeah, this way your child porn is distributed so the cops can't find it.
-
@JBert said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Regulatory and technological aspects of cloud technology are showing both opportunities and gaps in the rules on security and accessibility. Our proposal aims at addressing a problem that has not yet manifested using a protocol and discussing the normative aspects regarding the possibility of rendering a document completely immaterial. Our article proposes a protocol that uses the network in an unconventional way to make a document fully immaterial. By immaterial we mean that is not localisable anywhere in its entirety. If we continue the analogy to climate, we want to realise a fog of files rather than a cloud. The files are distributed on a public or private network and only the injectors and extractors can access them. The inaccessibility by others, the non-location, and the dynamics of the system offer significant advantages in terms of security but raise some legal problems.
Waaait... Are they describing Tor used for file storage, only done poorly?
The thought crossed my mind.
Filed under: fog computing, the inverse belt onion
-
@dkf said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
the attacker would need to capture a lot to be able to reconstruct.
The problem here is that attackers regularly capture a lot these days.
-
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Serverless is the new norm
You joke, but "we" were looking into replacing our Master Server architecture (which, among other things, keeps TCP connections between client servers for the purpose of controlling them) with Azure Functions (or whatever).
I said, "Um, no, that won't work, because persistent connections don't really exist like that in serverless environments unless you're paying for all that anyways, and by then it's more expensive than just starting a traditional server!"
-
Freenet exists and it works but it's probably not hip enough.
-
Sounds like something some friends did way-back while in uni. We had a hard 6mb quota on the filesystem, and were all looking for ways to extend it.
These guys set the routing information on the IP packages to go around the world using the slowest routes they could find. If you requested the file, it would be cycled out to /tmp, otherwise it would be sent on another grand tour.
I instead opted for uuencoding the files and storing them as the names of 0-byte files. Some others raided together the /tmp dirs of a couple of machines. Storing the files in the printer spooler was another idea, but no-one wanted to learn enough postscript to do that.
-
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
a hard 6mb quota
When was this, 1983?
-
@pydsigner - The entire premise is flawed and shows a complete misunderstanding of "cloud" which is unfortunately quite common. "Cloud" has nothing to do with "it is on the Internet" and has everything to do with on-demand provisioning and other functional aspects. About 30% of my companies clients have on-premise clouds. Up to 80% (according to published figures, I personally believe the number to be higher) of so-called "cloud offerings" are actually not cloud at all, but rather simply are on-premise network (typically Internet) based.
-
@RaceProUK said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
When was this, 1983?
Pretty sure I had a 50MB quota around 2003.
Parts of that file system had a hard limit on 2GB per file. You could hide your shenanigans by first filling up the log file, which would condemn further log entries to the great bit bucket. Not that the admins cared too much back then, as long as you didn't impede others' actual work.
-
@cvi said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Parts of that file system had a hard limit on 2GB per file.
I smell FAT32.
-
@RaceProUK said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
I smell FAT32.
These were unix machines (probably (open?)solaris, although the file server could have been running something different), so I doubt it.
-
@RaceProUK said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
a hard 6mb quota
When was this, 1983?
ISTR ours was 5 MB at the polytechnic in 1992. Definitely 10 MB when I changed to university in 1995.
@cvi said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
I smell FAT32.
These were unix machines (probably (open?)solaris, although the file server could have been running something different), so I doubt it.
2 GiB/file was completely normal these days. ext2 still had that problem in 1999 and I suppose so did UFS or whatever Solaris used then.
-
@RaceProUK said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
a hard 6mb quota
When was this, 1983?
Oi!
- SunOS 4.1-something.
Restrictions foster innovation.
-
-
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Youngster. :p
(Sneakernet with floppies was a viable thing back then. Crazy, but viable.)
-
@Mikael_Svahnberg BBMarkHTMLDownCode strikes again!
-
@dkf said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
(Sneakernet with floppies was a viable thing back then. Crazy, but viable.)
Try using paper-tape (at 10 bytes per inch density) as a "network" (and yes, there was a time when that was how code got from the engineering computer to the ones on the production floor)
-
@TheCPUWizard said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Try using paper-tape
No thanks. I'm not quite that old! But I am old enough to remember when the internet was highly experimental and students had to use other things instead (which were terrible; the internet just worked so much better).
-
@dkf said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
(Sneakernet with floppies was a viable thing back then. Crazy, but viable.)
Not on these:
We had a single machine with a disk station, so I guess the reach of our sneaker-net wasn't very far.
...I suppose you could have done a gatling-type of machine to insert a floppy, read a block, eject it, let the machine catch it and then insert the next floppy, and thereby support all users at once, but that sounds like hardware.
-
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
I suppose you could have done a gatling-type of machine to insert a floppy, read a block, eject it, let the machine catch it and then insert the next floppy, and thereby support all users at once, but that sounds like hardware.
That also sounds like a fun, if frustrating, weekend in the workshop :D
-
@JBert said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Are they describing Tor used for file storage, only done poorly?
… or what the Freenet has been doing since last millennium.
@LaoC said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Freenet exists and it works but it's probably not hip enough.
Ok, .
@dkf said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
except you'd need to also do clever slicing
Yeah, that's the one bit I am not sure how well Freenet does.
@CrazyEyes said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
To use their analogy, this is like saying that your mail is safer ripped apart in 8 pieces sitting in 8 separate mail trucks which are continuously driving around the United States. Which is perhaps true, but if a single one of those trucks don't make it, you can't make use of the letter
This is where the analogy breaks. With files, you can actually “split” a file to n pieces from which any m allow reading the file and any less then m are worthless. It's a useful technique to e.g. backup your SMIME or PGP keys using just free storage services. Not sure if that's what they mean though.
-
@dkf said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
(Sneakernet with floppies was a viable thing back then. Crazy, but viable.)
For a new hire here, sneakernet via USB fob is required to build our Windows product here.
-
@dcon said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@dkf said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
(Sneakernet with floppies was a viable thing back then. Crazy, but viable.)
For a new hire here, sneakernet via USB fob is required to build our Windows product here.
:that_doesnt_even:
-
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@dcon said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@dkf said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
(Sneakernet with floppies was a viable thing back then. Crazy, but viable.)
For a new hire here, sneakernet via USB fob is required to build our Windows product here.
:that_doesnt_even:
There's one component that gets built and shoved into a restricted S3 bucket. Rather than hassle with getting access to that, we sneakernet the 125MB 7z file.
-
@pydsigner said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
Our proposal aims at addressing a problem that has not yet manifested
And.... I'm out.
At least they were honest, at the very beginning.
-
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
We had a hard 6mb
How do you store a millibit?
-
@TheCPUWizard said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@pydsigner - The entire premise is flawed and shows a complete misunderstanding of "cloud" which is unfortunately quite common. "Cloud" has nothing to do with "it is on the Internet" and has everything to do with on-demand provisioning and other functional aspects. About 30% of my companies clients have on-premise clouds. Up to 80% (according to published figures, I personally believe the number to be higher) of so-called "cloud offerings" are actually not cloud at all, but rather simply are on-premise network (typically Internet) based.
There are also off-site private clouds.
The company I currently work for uses both on-premises clouds at for local needs at each office, as well as an off-site private cloud for company-wide needs currently running at a datacenter facility that provides intense security and promises 99.9% power and internet uptime. Realistically, for most offices, the on-premise clouds could be replaced with a large NAS server and a decent domain controller, and the off-site private cloud could largely be moved to Azure or AWS, but the powers that be have fallen prey to salesmen pitching technical buzz words.
-
@abarker said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
We had a hard 6mb
How do you store a millibit?
-
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@abarker said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Fog Computing, The New Cloud Computing:
We had a hard 6mb
How do you store a millibit?
You should look into getting a mobile keyboard with a Shift functionality. You can usually get such a keyboard for free, too.