Should I be concerned with bit flips on Amazon S3?

Question

I've got some data that I want to save on Amazon S3. Some of this data is encrypted and some is compressed. Should I be worried about single bit flips? I know of the MD5 hash header that can be added. This (from my experience) will prevent flips in the most unreliable portion of the deal (network communication), however I'm still wondering if I need to guard against flips on disk?

Answer 1

I'm almost certain the answer is "no", but if you want to be extra paranoid you can precalculate the MD5 hash before uploading, compare that to the MD5 hash you get after upload, then when downloading calculate the MD5 hash of the downloaded data and compare it to your stored hash.

I'm not sure exactly what risk you're concerned about. At some point you have to defer the risk to somebody else. Does "corrupted data" fall under Amazon's Service Level Agreement? Presumably they know what the file hash is supposed to be, and if the hash of the data they're giving you doesn't match, then it's clearly their problem.

I suppose there are other approaches too:

• Store your data with an FEC so that you can detect and correct N bit errors up to your choice of N.
• Store your data more than once in Amazon S3, perhaps across their US and European data centers (I think there's a new one in Singapore coming online soon too), with RAID-like redundancy so you can recover your data if some number of sources disappear or become corrupted.

It really depends on just how valuable the data you're storing is to you, and how much risk you're willing to accept.

Answer 2

I see your question from two points of view, a theoretical and practical.

From a theoretical point of view, yes, you should be concerned - and not only about bit flipping, but about several other possible problems. In particular section 11.5 of the customer agreements says that Amazon

MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OFFERINGS. (..omiss..) WE AND OUR LICENSORS DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE OFFERINGS WILL FUNCTION AS DESCRIBED, WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR FREE, OR FREE OF HARMFUL COMPONENTS, OR THAT THE DATA YOU STORE WITHIN THE SERVICE OFFERINGS WILL BE SECURE OR NOT OTHERWISE LOST OR DAMAGED.

Now, in practice, I'd not be concerned. If your data will be lost, you'll blog about it and (although they might not face any legal action), their business will be pretty much over.

On the other hand, that depends on how much vital your data is. Suppose that you were rolling your own stuff in your own data center(s). How would you plan for disaster recovery there? If you says: I'd just keep two copies in two different racks, just use the same technique with Amazon, maybe keeping two copies in two different datacenters (since you wrote that you are not interested in how to protect against bit flips, I'm providing only a trivial example here)

Answer 3

Probably not: Amazon is using checksums to protect against bit flips, regularly combing through data at rest, ensuring that no bit flips have occurred. So, unless you have corruption in all instances of the data within the interval of integrity check loops you should be fine.

Internally, S3 uses MD5 checksums throughout the system to detect/protect against bitflips. When you PUT an object into S3, we compute the MD5 and store that value. When you GET an object we recompute the MD5 as we stream it back. If our stored MD5 doesn't match the value we compute as we're streaming the object back we'll return an error for the GET request. You can then retry the request.

We also continually loop through all data at rest, recomputing checksums and validating them against the MD5 we saved when we originally stored the object. This allows us to detect and repair bit flips that occur in data at rest. When we find a bit flip in data at rest, we repair it using the redundant data we store for each object.

You can also protect yourself against bitflips during transmission to and from S3 by providing an MD5 checksum when you PUT the object (we'll error if the data we received doesn't match the checksum) and by validating the MD5 when GET an object.

Source: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=38587