Spurred on by a police raid back in 2006, Swedish Torrent indexing site, The Pirate Bay, has moved its database into the cloud, in hopes that it'll make life much more difficult for authorities, should they attempt to block or shut-down the service once again.
The new set-up sees TPB's transit router remain on-site in Sweden, whilst load balancing hardware now sits at a secondary site and, databases rest encrypted on a multitude of cloud servers.
"If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images." stated a TPB representative.
The approach is multi-pronged:
- A large multi-national policing effort would be required to seize a significant proportion of hardware.
- With no evidence present on either the routing or load balancing hardware, obtaining a warrant would prove a challenge and nothing would be gained from its seizure.
- Separating computational components from storage allows for cheap, cloud-based file storage, whilst routers and balancers remain portable, quick and cheap to replace.
- Likely, TPB has sleeper hardware/databases already in-place to go-live when any piece of the puzzle is compromised.
