Something About Cloud ...

CIA is the term that you will meet all the time when you work in the area of security.  It can be related to all kinds of computer sciences aspects including recent buzz-work: cloud storage.  By design, most cloud storage systems (what I am talking about is consumer products such as Dropbox, SkyDrive .. etc) play as a centralized role, user doesn't need to worry about which server I should contact, which server I should place my file on.  These are quire non-brainer operations, and this is why they become so popular.  However, there are several studies popping up saying they are really worry about the situation we place all our sensitive data onto a (I don't know if I should trust) cloud provider.  The service provide might be down, my data might be corrupted, or even they will steal my (I don't know if that's important) private data.  And then, there are several different kinds of approaches proposed to fix these problems.  One interesting idea (which is used by several papers) I saw is to distributed your data to multiple service providers.  This reminds me the old research (Malugo, 2008): distributed all your data to a peer-to-peer network.  The interesting part is that, they are reusing those techniques (ideas) which has been used in the peer-to-peer network.  But couple years ago, people say, peer-to-peer storage doesn't have hope, they are too "distributed", people don't want to care where to place data (although there are bootstraps).  They see cloud storage, you just need to send all your data in a centralized server, and let the cloud worries the rest.  Now they are saying, no no no, the cloud is too centralized, we should distributed them.  And again, turn the cloud storage very distributed (by using some "out-dated" concepts that have been proposed in peer-to-peer network.  We just need to keep saying old things don't work then we can use some more even old technique to get some more new publications, isn't it? :p