Hackers And Clouds: How Secure Is The Web?

by NPR STAFF

Protecting The Cloud

Another tech company hackers were watching closely this week was Apple. CEO Steve Jobs announced the iCloud, a new service that will allow Apple users to store all their email, photos, music and documents on an array of servers.

"By centralizing their data, they've really painted a target on their back," says David Brumley, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He says Apple's iCloud is a bank of servers in a building the size of two football fields in North Carolina.

"From the reports, they have barbed wire around the building, they have guards and you're going to need an ID to get into those buildings," he says. "So the physical security is actually pretty good. It would be a lot like getting onto a military installation to actually get into Apple's iCloud data center."

Though it may be tough to break into the server's headquarters, Mitnick (mitnicksecurity.com) says, breaking in online could be another story.

"I was hired to test this cloud infrastructure in South America. Literally in the 15 minutes that I was on the phone with the CEO of the company and one of the lead technical guys, I was able to get access that only system administrators should get access to," he says.

via npr.org

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"The demos look good, the iCloud technical sessions at the WWDC went well. But the full-scale implementation remains to be field-tested. For the document editing example, Apple used an iPad to iPhone and back example, and merely mentioned the Mac as a participant later in the presentation. Annoying details such as iWork file format incompatibilities between Macs and iDevices need closer inspection as they might make reality a little less pristine than the theory.

For developers, the new APIs just released will enable more applications to offer the seamless multi-device updates just demonstrated.

If iCloud works as represented, it will be very competitive – and the price is right: free for the first 5Gb of documents. (Content such as music or video and apps don't count in those 5Gb.)"

via guardian.co.uk · Cloud computing

Jean-Louis Gassée (mondaynote.com: What I want for my Mac):

"I thought that’s why we have Apple, the non-IT company that caters to The Rest of Us, but, unfortunately, its Cloud services are messy, unpredictable, and filled with rigid silos. The Apple Cloud is supposed to smooth the seams of synchronization but fails to do so because information isn’t properly shared between its various functions."

via mondaynote.com

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