Let me first give you this link that has shown that Storjlabs has at least thought about so called commercial SNOs or data center partners in the past: Commercial SNO & Data Center Partners vs Decentralized storage
True ‘some’ SNO might not be trusted, but ‘some’ SNO really would not have the ability or resources to fulfill all requirements for such upload tasks. Including trust. Would I trust some home SNO? No, not at all. But would I trust a reputable data center in my country that happens to be a Tardigrade uploader, something like (just throwing names here) Hetzner, OVH or at least something that I can google. Yes, I guess this could be achieved.
I think that’s all merely technical questions. I don’t have the right answers for that. But I was thinking of hardware encryption for the HDDs, uploading with public/private key encryption, so that a customers passwords don’t have to be revealed.
Of course Storj could help by creating container-like import formats and technical workflows for automation. Maybe something like this:
- Customer receives ‘special’ HDDs with hardware encryption and a software tool where he can move his data into it.
- Software tool makes sure data is correctly copied and creates an encrypted container for it.
- Customer ships HDDs to Storjlabs approved data center.
- Data center loads the container into their tool and uploads the data. The tool takes care that uploaded data is correct while maintaining encryption.
- If everything successfull, HDDs data gets securely wiped from the HDDs.
And to make sure that the data center meets all requirements, it could become something like “Storjlabs or Tardigrade approved”.
Again: I have no idea about this could be achieved in terms of technical detail. Do you have details how Amazon or Backblaze are doing this?
Edit: I was just thinking about the digital cinema, and they have this approach with DCP container files and KMS files to unlock encryption. Maybe something like this could work in such an upload scenario as well, so that without a customer provided ‘kms’ file, the date on the disk remain unusable even for the upload data center.
Yes that’s true. But I was thinking from the other side: About additional services a commercial or data center SNO could provide as Storjlabs has mentioned such in the past. Those could be a preferred choice for such upload tasks. They could become something like “Storj approved” if they follow certain procedures and fulfill all requirements and also being listed on the Tardigrade website and stuff like that. So a customer could be sure that this service works seamlessly with Tardigrade (maybe has even special tools provided by Storjlabs) and meet all other requirements, like bandwidth, CPU power, privacy, security etc. etc.