Ontape security when shipping tapes

We have a need to ship a level-0 ontape backup that will contain sensitive data. How secure is the data when backed up using ontape? Could a potential threat use a UNIX utility such as dd to read the tape? Thanks, Kevin -- kxk0912 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ kxk0912's Profile: http://www.dbtalk.net/m636 View this thread: http://www.dbtalk.net/t324905

kxk0912 wrote: > We have a need to ship a level-0 ontape backup that will contain > sensitive data. How secure is the data when backed up using ontape? > Could a potential threat use a UNIX utility such as dd to read the > tape? > > Thanks, > Kevin > > Seeing as when you do an ontape to a remote machine IDS USES dd - what do you think? Making sense of the contents is another matter - without the right version of IDS to load it into I suggest you dd the archive off the tape to disk - compress and encrypt - dd onto another tape - ship it - and reverse the process the other end. -- Clive

It's not safe at all. You really don't even need to know that much to find good information. You could scan it for SSN looking things and then look around for names. Send me the tape and I'll see if I can figure out if it's easy to figure out what is on it. ;-) (Free of charge.) Can you put the backup on disk and then ssh or encrypt it? You could use an external backup to copy each raw device to a file and then encrypt each of these files and then send them. You then reverse the process on the other side. Of course don't include the password with the tape. =) Of course with 10 you could back it up to STDIO pipe it through ssh (is ssh secure enough?) and then restore it on the other side. kxk0912 wrote: > We have a need to ship a level-0 ontape backup that will contain > sensitive data. How secure is the data when backed up using ontape? > Could a potential threat use a UNIX utility such as dd to read the > tape? > > Thanks, > Kevin > > > -- > kxk0912 > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > kxk0912's Profile: http://www.dbtalk.net/m636 > View this thread: http://www.dbtalk.net/t324905