[Cryptography] Cubbit

[Jerry Leichter]

Anyone looked at/into Cubbit (cubbit.io)?  This is a "distributed cloud" implementation - you buy a piece of hardware that joins all the others to form a distributed file storage network.  The site has a basic overview of the approach which says all the right stuff - they encrypt locally with AES-256, split the result into chunks, Reed-Solomon encode, then distributed the pieces across the hardware boxes.  Meanwhile the AES key is encrypted based on a password and also distributed so that you can access your stuff from anywhere.  They use a Bittorrent variant to allow fast access to multiple chunks in parallel.

Of course, the devil - especially for the crypto - is in the details.  I found references to two talks (which I didn't follow up) but no published papers with more details -though there is a published paper comparing the energy usage of their implementation to traditional cloud implementations, with theirs winning easily.  (I must admit to some skepticism about that one.  There has to be spinning rust tied to some compute elements and a network *somewhere*, and the amounts needed, and the energy used, has to be supplied - and it's generally more efficient to centralize that stuff, especially if you can - as the big cloud providers have - centralize it in areas where you can get local solar power or free atmospheric cooling.  But ... I do need to read that paper in detail.)

                                                        -- Jerry