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Comment by dz0ny | Hacker News Reader

Only client stuff, skip...

If you absolutely need server stuff, Tahoe-LAFS [0] looks good. The mailing list is great[1-2]. An interesting service uses it, Least Authority[3] offers Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3[4]. It runs for free on Dropbox, too[5].

"Tahoe-LAFS is a Free and Open cloud storage system. It distributes your data across multiple servers. Even if some of the servers fail or are taken over by an attacker, the entire filesystem continues to function correctly, including preservation of your privacy and security."[0]

TL,DR: Storage nodes can't decrypt your data, so you don't have to trust them.

[0] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs

[1] https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev

[2] https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2012-December/thr...

[3] https://leastauthority.com/

[4] https://leastauthority.com/howtoconfigure/

[5] https://tahoe-lafs.org/~marlowe/TWN27.html (mid-page)

(no affil.)

I would not feel good about my data on random people's servers. I don't trust the encryption. not today and definitely not 10 or 30 years from now when they could still have the data.

That's why its being open source is relevant. Paranoid folks like us set up a private network locally or on any number of our own physically secure servers.

It's also an interesting question:

How comfortable do we feel relying upon the "principle of least authority" long-term in a mixed-trust environment? i.e., a p2p-style Tahoe-LAFS grid, or deploying it privately using a commercial vendor like Amazon S3 (either directly or through Dropbox for free), on our own servers, and everything in between.

You might not trust companies from certain countries with your data, and you shouldn't be forced to in order to store it* in the cloud*.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_Least_Authority

"[…] You might not trust Companies with your data either, and you shouldn't be forced to in order to store it in the cloud". That is exactly our goal: we don't like to be forced to trust companies for the security of data, so we are developing a service where users actually don't have to trust even us… although some trust in the encryption algorithms used will be required, given that you can see the implementation of course.

So how do you differentiate your service from Least Authority [0]?

[0] https://leastauthority.com/

On the contrary.

As a user of a service the client is the only piece that I really care about wrt data security. If I can verify that the client isn't secretly uploading encryption keys to the server while claiming to encrypt my data, it's a massive win for transparency.

The server is a just an abstracted hard disk. Why would I care how it is implemented?

Because some people want to run their own DropBox clone, and titling the post "...goes Open Source" usually (correct me if I'm wrong) implies that the ENTIRE product goes open-source, not just half of it in order to prove that its security is "for real".

Apologies if the title of the post is not clear, I should have specified that it was only about the client. You are right, one of our main goals is to prove that our security is "for real". However, we also hope that our open source client might be useful to other projects, as well as for developers to fork it and implement themselves what is out of our scope.

Basically, yes, that's the point. Publishing the source code of the client allows the users to be sure that FileRock (Client) isn't "secretly uploading encryption keys to the servers". But please note that the server is not just an abstracted hard disk: it has a role in efficiently checking the integrity of your data, which goes beyond the encryption. For instance, FileRock is able to efficiently detect whether the data has been tampered by deleting a file. Although some of the work is done on the server, the client can counter-check its answers.

In the spirit of the service it's the only "stuff" that matters: when it comes to security checks, the FileRock client does not trust our servers :-)

By that reasoning alone, tarsnap would also be something skip - but it's not. I haven't looked at FileRock (yet) and don't know any of the technical details, but there's still possibility to do interesting things without trusting the server (though I don't know if FR have succeeded at this).

i can really recommend owncloud if you want to run something like this on your own servers - works like a charm. http://owncloud.org

i think - from reading descriptions/opinions - that the more recent 'seafile' could be even better.

I can't. Tried owncloud, as an alternative to my paid Dropbox account. It's incredibly slow to sync anything moderately large. I handed it 30GB of my 70GB home directory, and filesystem traversal on startup was taking 15min. On an ssd. Where Dropbox would take 15-30s.

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