Scrap dump: Elements of a secure distributed network

An ideally secure network will have certain features:

• Encrypted contents: MITM attacks cannot determine what data is moving across the network.
• Encrypted storage: Those with physical access to a network node cannot tell what data the node contains.
• Redundancy: The network can survive the removal of any node without loss of data.
• Expansion: The operator can raise new nodes with minimal effort.
• Immunity: The network can resist the insertion of fraudulent nodes by a hostile party.

Basically, an encrypted cloud with encrypted transportation running on servers with encrypted disks.

Advanced features:

• Confusing transportation: Upon intercepting and decoding a message, an observer cannot identify the sender or intended recipient.
• Invisible transportation: The network cannot be identified unless the observer is looking for it.
• Obscured transport method: An observer will have difficulty determining that observed traffic is part of the network. For example, data sent over DNS or ICMP may be ignored by most observers.
• Obscured transmission method: An observer with physical access will have difficulty observing that the transmission is taking place. For example, there was a virus that communicated with other infected systems in the same server room using sounds outside of human hearing range through a computer's speakers and microphones.

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zdnet lists five cloud systems: Openstack, Docker, KVM, CloudStack, Ceph. Docker is reportedly popular.

Ceph is a distributed storage engine. The others seem to be different types of products.

The closest to an off-the-shelf system might be:

1. Use Ceph
2. Run every Ceph instance on an encrypted HD
3. Run every intermediary connection through an encrypted tunnel
4. Run the tunnels through tor?
5. Develop a generic method of raising a new node and adding it