Wondering who gets to see my source/data in the cloud

Question

Let us assume I have few ideas that I don't want stolen and I am willing to pay a reasonable price.

There are instances like this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369188,00.asp or the facebook story, or the early apple/xerox story.

which could happen in cloud services like ec2, heroku, linode, azure etc.

Assuming I have a good mix of interpreted/compiled code, how can I protect my source and ideas from being stolen? I know I am not really idea rich nor is there some source thief on the loose. I just have this nagging feeling about putting source code in the cloud, which I am sure some of you also have or didn't care much about.

Would disk encryption help? What are my choices (other than building my own mini data center?)

Answer 1

If you are hosting your code in the cloud at some point you will need to trust your host. Otherwise you'll be doing the hosting yourself. True, any host that has your code may be able to take the code and use it, but if you choose a host that seems trustworthy, has a good reputation, and many other satisfied customers you can probably wager that your code will be secure.

Encrypting things on disk might help - it depends what you're encrypted and how you use it. Do you need your data to be unencrypted at some point to work on it? Is your data only transferred from one place to another? How much damage could an adversary do if they got a hold of your data?

You may be interested in this answer, which outlines several options.