Security

Strong Encryption
Your files are protected using 448 bit Blowfish Encryption before they leave your PC. This extremely secure "bank grade" encryption algorithm has never been cracked. Your files are then stored in this encrypted state at our secure data center.

Individual Data Security
With Data Deposit Box, each user gets their own individual account and password. This means that each user also gets a unique encryption key. This encryption key ensures that while your data is securely stored at our data center, only you have access to your data. In fact, even our most privileged systems administrators do not have the ability to decrypt your data.

Password Security
Great lengths are taken in our system to ensure your password remains a secret. Our password security practices have been modeled after premier online banking web sites.

Your password is encrypted before it is stored in our database. At no point is an administrator able to retrieve your password. Nor does an administrator have the ability to set your password to a known value.

When you activate your account, you are required to choose a password and set up a security question. If you forget your password, or repeatedly try to log in with an incorrect password, the system will lock you out after a few attempts. You may then reset your password by correctly answering your security question.

If you incorrectly answer your security question, you are again locked out after a few attempts. In the unlikely event that you forget your password and the answer to your security question, you must contact Data Deposit Box directly for manual identity verification.

Secure Data Center
Your data is securely stored in our Carrier Grade data center. Our all Cisco based switched network employs redundant Internet providers, redundant routers, and redundant firewalls. We use BGP and HSRP protocols to implement fail-over and redundancy. Our data center was up and running throughout the big blackout of August 2003.

We use only Carrier Grade computer hardware from major manufactures to store your data. There are no "clones" in our data center. All systems operate on redundant power. Servers have dual power supplies fed from separate electrical panels. The facility includes triple redundant diesel generators, dual redundant UPSs, the latest fire suppression equipment, and 24 hour guards on-site.

When your data is stored on our servers, it is written to RAID 5 disk arrays (including hot spare drives). Each storage server is then replicated in real time to a second storage server for backup. Every precaution is taken to protect the integrity of your data.

End to End Verification
As each file is transferred to our data center, we carefully verify its integrity against a known CRC signature. Files are reverified each time they are written to disk. If any file fails verification, it is retransmitted from your PC or recovered from the replica server. This ensures that the data stored on our servers is the same data that was stored on your PC.

Secure Protocol The Data Deposit Box client communicates with our servers over a proprietary protocol that was designed specifically for Internet backup. Other Internet backup products that use popular web protocols like HTTP, FTP, or WebDav can be vulnerable to hacker and virus attacks. The extreme popularity of these protocols makes them a target. It is extremely unlikely that a hacker is going to invest the time and effort to go after a proprietary protocol. Even if they did, the 448 bit Blowfish Encryption has never been broken.

Firewalls
To maximize compatibility with home and corporate firewalls, the protocol used by our Backup Client was designed to look to a firewall just like the SSL protocol used in web browsers. This means that if you are able to surf to our web site, you will be able to connect with our backup software.

Specifically, our backup client runs on port 443 and mimics SSL's handshaking protocol. Almost all firewalls will pass our backup traffic without reconfiguration. We also support the use of proxy servers. Our web browser interface also uses generic HTTP and HTTPS on ports 80 and 443.

Corporate Remote Access Policy
Many organizations have a policy to control access to their data from outside of the organization. VPNs and Firewalls are generally used to control this, but become ineffective when the data is stored off-site. The same features that empower a laptop user to backup and restore his data while on the road may violate corporate information policy.

Data Deposit Box includes the ability to restrict data access to only specific IP addresses. A Corporate Administrator can define the IP address ranges of their firewalls and access points. Once the definitions are in place, users can only access the data from the allowed locations.

About Strong Encryption

Data Deposit Box and the Blowfish Algorithm
Of the hundreds of encryption algorithms available today, Blowfish stands out as the industry leader and has been selected by Data Deposit Box as its encryption algorithm.

Blowfish is a symmetric encryption algorithm designed in 1993 by Bruce Schneier as an alternative to existing encryption algorithms such as DES. Unlike DES, however, the Blowfish algorithm has a variable key length, which can be extended from 32 bits to 448 bits, making this a more secure alternative. Blowfish is a 64-bit cipher (i.e. a cryptographic key and algorithm are applied to a block of data rather than single bits).

Blowfish is a fast, free alternative to existing algorithms and has been analyzed considerably through years of peer review.

Length = Strength
Finding the plain text of an encrypted message without knowing the key is called "cracking" an algorithm. This brute-force attack consists of trying all possible values of keys until the right one is found.

It is easy to demonstrate that in the case of brute-force attack, the security increases together with the length of the key. If the key is 8 bits long, there are 2(to the power of 8), or 256 possible combinations. With a key of 40 bits this is increased to 2(to the power of 40), or one thousand billion combinations. The protection then resides on the time needed for a computer to perform its attack. Based on these premises as well as numerous industry trials, it is common opinion today that

40-bit key algorithms are useless as they can be "cracked" within a few hours by an average personal computer
64-bit algorithms are safe today but will become threatened as technology evolves
128-bit and over algorithms are almost unbreakable. In other words, it would take millions of years to try every possible combination of bits in a 128-bit key

Based on calculations it can be said that a 128-bit encryption is not just three times stronger than a 40-bit encryptionit is 309,485,009,821,345,068,724,781,056 times stronger. Likewise, a 448-bit encryption key is 2.1 x 1096 times stronger than a 128-bit key.

Speed
The speed of the blowfish algorithm is also impressive. The table below illustrates the effective throughput of the algorithm and shows how even large key lengths result in much faster performance than other encryption algorithms.

Speed Comparisons of Block Ciphers on a Pentium

	Clock cycles per round	# of rounds	# of clock cycles per byte encrypted	Notes
Blowfish	9	16	18	Free, unpatented
Khufu/Khafre	5	32	20	Patented by Xerox
RC5	12	16	23	Patented by RSA Data Security
DES	18	16	45	56-bit key
IDEA	50	8	50	Patented by Ascom-Systec
Triple-DES	18	48	108	Very popular

Conclusion
Data Deposit Box considered many factors when choosing Blowfish as its encryption technology, including peer review, speed and key strength. It is clear that Blowfish will set the standard for years to come, and will continue to be the preferred encryption algorithm for corporations worldwide.