Nasuni, the company offering a cloud storage gateway that I wrote about earlier this year, has announced a challenge: if you can reveal the contents of a file stored via a Nasuni Filer, you can win $5,000. The contest runs for 30 days, so if you’d like to take part you better hurry.
The challenge is fairly simple, and it’s not so much a test of “cloud storage security” as it is a test of OpenPGP encryption. A Nasuni Filer works by presenting a traditional shared filesystem via your local network; any files uploaded to that share are cached locally and then uploaded to your choice of cloud storage service (currently Amazon S3, Iron Mountain ASP, Nirvanix SDN or Rackspace Cloud Files). To make sure you are not depending on your storage provider to keep your files private, the Nirvanix system encrypts the files before storing them remotely.
The files used in the challenge were encrypted using a 2048-bit DSA key and AES-256 encryption. This should prove more than secure enough to last the 30 days of the challenge. Normally, you’d have to correctly guess the storage provider used, the exact location chosen for the files at that storage provider, and make sure you managed to defeat any security measures the cloud provider put up to prevent unauthorized access; but in this case Nirvanix made things a bit easier by making the S3 volume used available at http://nasunifiler091711366601450206709262414.s3.amazonaws.com/list.html
If you’re into these kinds of challenges: note that there are several other contests with “easier” encryption and higher prizes. RSA has some, and more are easily found.
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