At Digital Democracy we work with various communities around the globe, many of which deal with very senstive data that has been collected locally.
We’re building a platform on top of BalenaOS, the Earth Defenders Toolkit Offline, and we’re currently using Balena Cloud as we still haven’t gotten into running our own Open Balena. And some questions have appeared around security and sovereignty over data.
Does the Balena team have any type of back-door into the devices without concent?
Is collected data encrypted? If Balena Cloud was hacked, would our partner’s devices and data be compromised as well?
Hello @luandro thank you for your ping! Your technology is great and i hope you can help to anyone who need it!
Is collected data encrypted? If Balena Cloud was hacked, would our partner’s devices and data be compromised as well?
You might need to work with the Full Disk Encryption and Secure boot new features that we are adding at the balenaOS. What type of devices are you using?
At the moment, this is working on beta for the x86 devices (e.g. Intel NUC, etc). Once the FDE and SB will be in production we will start working on adding this into balenaOS for ARM devices (e.g. Raspberry Pi, etc).
In the meantime, there is an interesting discussion here below to get extra ideas
Does offline mode help in security in any way?
Offline mode updates you mean? I understand that you don’t want to get your data stored on the device compromised, right?
Let’s start a discussion here on how we can help you more!
Hello @luandro we are discussing internally the back-door into the devices.
As balena we do have access to the devices to provide support to our customers. The only way you can manage everything under your control is running openBalena.
