Symform Encrypts All Data Using Military-Grade Encryption
A typical datacenter protects your information using RAID 5 or RAID 6 storage, which distributes data across only a few servers, and can crash in the event of just two or three simultaneous disk failures. Symform’s Resilient Storage Architecture uses RAID 96 to create an impermeable web of data protection by blocking, encrypting, and shredding your data, adding parity fragments, and geographically scattering the fragments of each block of data to 96 different servers in the Symform network. Not only are your files protected from a few simultaneous disk failures—each block of a file is protected from the failure of up to 33 unrelated, geographically separate disks. Even the threat of a widespread regional disaster is all but eliminated by Symform’s groundbreaking architecture.
- Symform first breaks each file into blocks of up to 64MB, depending on the file’s size. Smaller files are broken into smaller blocks.
- It then encrypts each block using the federally certified AES-256 encryption algorithm. Just for reference, 128-bit encryption is the federal minimum: our 256-bit encryption is exponentially stronger. Symform automatically encrypts each block of data with a unique, 256-bit key, which it generates by performing a SHA256 hash on the block itself. Because it uses the hash of the block as the block’s key, Symform will be able to de-duplicate the blocks without needing to decrypt them. If a block already exists in the network, it will not need to be re-uploaded: Symform achieves bandwidth efficiency without compromising security.
- Next, each block of data is further shredded into 64 fragments.
- Symform builds in 1.5x data redundancy by adding 32 parity fragments using Reed-Solomon erasure coding. This redundancy adds durability: in the event that a block of data must be recovered, any 64 out of the 96 fragments of the block will be sufficient to reconstruct it.
- The 96 fragments of each block are distributed to 96 unique, geographically disparate devices on the Symform network, over parallel internet connections. Should data ever need to be recovered, Symform brings back the fragments over parallel connections, restoring your information 10 to 50 times faster than a datacenter could. What’s more, only 64 pieces of each block of data are needed to reconstruct the block, making the restore process even faster.
- Finally, the system is self-healing: even when devices fail, Symform’s Resilient Storage Architecture automatically regenerates and redistributes lost data fragments, constantly maintaining the durability of your data.
Symform’s Resilient Storage Architecture Guarantees Impenetrable Data Protection
In order for a perpetrator to compromise just one block of data, they would need to be able to identify 64 of the 96 individual Symform devices across which the block’s fragments are spread, compromise those devices, extract the fragments, and reassemble them. They would then need to obtain the block’s randomly generated 256-bit key by breaking into Symform’s Cloud Control. Just to reassemble one file, they would need to repeat this whole process for potentially hundreds of blocks.