FAQ

Some questions come up more often – so we decided to try to answer them right away!

TECHNOLOGIES

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is fragmentiX not available as a Service? Why a hardware box?

Coming from the field of digital forensics, our founder and technicians very quickly realised that the desired level of security of fragmentiX solutions can only be achieved in a very strictly controlled environment. This starts with the supply chain of all components and ends with securing the access authorisation required for communication with various cloud storage providers. It would be easy to implement fragmentiX as a “software-only”-solution, but this would not fulfil the required high level of protection for sensitive data.

Who can access the buckets holding a fragment of my data?

Everyone who has the correct login credentials (or was able to hack/breach into the server/provider) can access the data fragments in the S3 bucket.

All the available methods to protect a S3 bucket are exactly the same – no matter if you have your original data stored in a particular bucket – or a fragment that was produced by your fragmentiX appliance. The big difference is that with a fragment of your original data even the owner of a future quantum computer can not learn anything about the original data.

As a normal user without extensive IT skills - is it possible to install and use fragmentiX technology?

Yes – one of our most important design principles in creating fragmentiX was “ease of installation and use”. Since only truly fully automated IT protection works – at least that is our strong and educated opinion on the matter – we made sure that after a one-time setup, which is easily done via a web-interface, our appliances “magically” do everything. The user experience is exactly the same as when using a normal network drive on their PC or Mac.

Why should I trust fragmentiX? How can I be sure that they do not spy on my data?

Good and valid question! Since we are a privately held corporation in the geopolitically neutral country of Austria / Europe we had the luck not to be intimidated by government or law enforcement to include backdoors or other ways to compromise the security and privacy we can provide to our customers. As our clear vision is to bring digital sovereignty to our customers, we try very hard to do everything possible to achieve this. Only the owner/user of a fragmentiX appliance knows how they configured the system – so not even we as the developers and producers of the appliances have any way to learn this secret configuration data. The sensitive configuration data includes usernames, passwords and the credentials (again usernames/passwords and URLs etc.) of the LOCATIONS – the places where the actual fragments are stored. Please ask us for more details on how we protect this sensitive information!

Can I use fragmentiX to exchange sensitive data with partners?

Yes, definitely you can. Since you can communicate the necessary LOCATIONS information – the buckets and the credentials to these buckets – with your partners, it works like it would with a single S3 bucket: whoever has the right login credential can access the data.

Is it possible to restore the data if one (or more) of the LOCATIONs fails?

At least one storage strategy is defined when configuring the fragmentiX appliance. The number of fragments created (n) and the number of fragments required to restore the data (k) are defined in each storage strategy. If k (or more) fragments (LOCATIONs) are available, the data can be restored.

What is the name of the protocol that is in place for the communication between the fragmentiX desktop client and the appliances?

The fragmentiX desktop client uses a protocol that is called simple storage service or S3 via HTTPS to connect to the appliances.

Which cloud storage providers are supported by fragmentiX appliances?

S3-compatible storage providers are in general supported by fragmentiX Storage Appliance products.
It is not guaranteed that they support all features used by fragmentiX, but chances are good that they do. Contact fragmentiX to ensure that your S3-compatible storage provider is fully supported.

So far we have validated that the fragmentiX Storage Appliance products work as promised with Amazon AWS, Wasabi, Alibaba, Linode, Backblaze, ITandTel and MinIO.

Additionally, there is support for MS Azure BLOB, NFS storage and even USB storage devices.

Want to know more?

If you have any questions not answered on our website, please do not hesitate to contact us.