As Customers Seek Privacy, AeroFS Emerges With Stealthy File Sharing Software

It's becoming increasingly common with this kind of hybrid product that has both hosted and on-premises offerings. You either trust your customers or you don't. And if you want their business, you need to trust them. Sure, some will take advantage of this - but most will do the right thing.

In addition, the customers that have requirements for this kind of offering are the last who are likely to skimp on payments. If a customer wants on-premise solutions, they do not want it calling home. Period, for any reason, not ever. These tend to be more regulated environments, where product licensing is taken seriously.

[edit: object and predicate should match. or something like that.]

As the other reply said, to a certain extent you have to trust your customers. Big companies don't want to be exposed to liability - I know of a large organization that accidentally skimped on their license accounting for a database product (not Oracle) and got handed a $40m bill. They negotiated it down from there, but still, people lose their jobs over things like that.

Along those lines, the contracts that customers sign should always include a clause that says you have the right to audit them if you believe they are not in compliance. Typically, you don't want to do that unless you absolutely have to, but it can be a useful tool when renegotiating enterprise "all-you-can-eat" support contracts.

Still, there's technical stuff you can do. Log the IP address, hostname, hostid, mac address, and so on into your logs on startup. Then, when a customer submits a support case and uploads log files, store that info somewhere. Or create a "support package" that includes anonymous usage data and ask customers to upload.

But the absolute last thing you want to do is deal with licenses and keys and hard limitations. All you'll do is piss off your customers when they hit their hard limit under a deadline at Friday at 4pm.

you can similarly firewall/inspect traffic on the AeroFS Private Cloud clients :)

You could have a look at Owncloud (http://owncloud.org). I played around with it a couple of days ago and seems to be quite powerful. It acts very much like Dropbox and can be installed on any web server that supports PHP.

You could try Filosync (I'm the founder). You can run the server on any Linux box: https://www.filosync.com/#get-started

What about BitTorrent Sync?

It's a nice way to alleviate the barrier to monetization that open-source-as-security poses. In short, instead of having lamdba user trusting 'the community' for security audits, now each user has to implement security measures.

This leaves users holding the bag. Well, it should work for you but remains subpar.

Congrats nonetheless.

This is probably true. I'm trying to think other attack vectors.. not really coming up with any yet.

Slightly sad that we can't trust things on our own network now... goes and turn on firewall for individual machines on my own network

Does AeroFS do both encryption for in-flight and at-rest data?

One of the things I didn't like about AeroFS when I last looked at it was the dependency of having Java avail on systems. I try to remove Java as much as possible and it certainly would be nice if the AeroFS client were avail in a different bundle.

I was looking for a fast file syncing solution that worked on Win/Mac/Lin and didn't really need any GUI or web interface for my files like those 2 services seem to focus on.

Also Tonido has a 2GB limit on their free plan whereas AeroFS lets me sync as much files as I have storage space on my computers (so literally hundreds of GB).

I have not. I basically stopped checking out file syncing solutions as Aero has been working well so far.

I'll have a look at BTsync now though. The feature set seems similar but btsync seems to have better mobile apps (Aero only has an Android app and no iPhone one).

Do you have a link to a tarball for "Private Cloud"? Then I'll tell you what I think.

> You can have both. Encrypt everything before uploading, decrypt on download (and I don't mean SSL, I mean client encrypts, sends encrypted data over SSL, data is stored encrypted, only decrypted by client).

Yep, client-side encryption is the only working solution.

The funky bit is that on Linux you can make this fully transparent at the OS level. Expose remote storage via iSCSI, and attach to it so the storage shows up as a block device on your client system. Then put regular on-disk ("partition level") encryption on top of the blockdevice using cryptsetup, and that's it. All storage data sent over the wire is now encrypted, and the crypto mapping layer takes care of hiding the gritty details.

Because the encryption happens beneath the filesystem layer, all the usual tools work as before. For them the only difference is the latency. (Network connection naturally causes an upper bound that is way lower than a local drive.) Works wonderfully for backups, where you want to do incrementals in any case. Just ship rdiff deltas and have a backup tool which takes care of the work.

I actually implemented this as my Master's thesis back in 2006, only to be informed later on that logically identical construct had been shown as early as 2003.