Clouds!

[Ian Batten]

> 
> Apart from some very speculative schemes[1], if you want to do
> computing in someone else's cloud, someone else is going to have
> complete access to the data on those virtual machines, and whether
> you've encrypted the disks or not won't make a blind bit of
> difference.

It's a pretty active area of research, though, so I don't think we should assume this is axiomatic.    For most cases, the desired position is not that access to the data is impossible, rather that it's impractical relative to the value of the data to the attacker.   In some cases, schemes which rely on the security properties given by processors and support logic (for example, "Trusted Execution" as leveraged by the CMU "Flicker" project headed by Jonathan McClure) may be sufficient.

ian