Keeping your stuff safe, simply | Hacker News Reader

Keeping your stuff safe, simply

blog.dropbox.com

26 pointsjohns20 comments

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Here's two projects that Dropbox should tackle for security:

1. Open source their client app.

2. Client-side encrypt their user's data.

Is there anything stopping you writing your own client that uses the Dropbox API?

Heh, I do: https://github.com/diafygi/byoFS

Not enough, I would only trust it if I can deploy my own instance and read its source.

3. Remove Condoleezza Rice from their board of directors

I left Dropbox when I decided I just can't trust my long-term important data to closed source software. Since then I've been on a little odyssey exploring the open source contenders.

I ran owncloud briefly. File syncing performance was terrible. You really don't want to write your file synchronization service as an afterthought inside a PHP application.

I ran seafile for a while, but I don't like their security story. The authors have said some things that show they are a little out of their depth when it comes to crypto. Also, last I checked they had no good story for running multiple server in parallel, and the data on the server is not accessible as regular files. Also, written in C, and there are very few people I trust to write C without nuking my security.

I ran git-annex. Joey Hess is doing a good job with that project, but I think the symlink-oriented architecture is just not good enough. "Direct mode" is supposed to avoid symlinks, but direct mode seems much less stable, and it still exposes symlinks when you have data that's only partially synced. Too many apps do bad things when you give them symlinks. Also, I like Haskell the language, but Haskell the toolchain sucks hard, and I gave up trying to build git-annex from source to play with it.

Now I'm running syncthing and I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised. I had passed on them earlier due to reports of performance problems, but since the 0.9 release performance is much improved. The global discovery is particularly nice. I have two servers and two laptops all synchronizing with each other. One server is publicly reachable, the other is inside a LAN only accessible when I'm inside. It does the right thing whether I'm home inside the LAN, where I get fast sync with the local server. It does the right thing when I'm away, synchronizing with the publicly addressable server, which then transitively synchronizes with the LAN server.

It's written in Go, so I'm less worried about buffer overrun shenanigans. It uses the stock Go SSL stack, so no worrying about weird hand-rolled transport and authentication protocols. And authentication is clear and simple: every client has a cert, the client's name is the cert's fingerprint. No certificate authorities.

Syncthing has some versioning support, but I decided to use bup instead for belt-and-suspenders. So all my synced files are also snapshotted by bup every ten minutes on both servers.

I will only come back to Dropbox when I can have client-side encryption.

I use CryptSync on Windows to auto-encrypt/decrypt files between a folder outside and a folder inside my DropBox area. It uses 7z under the hood which is OK for most uses.

https://code.google.com/p/cryptsync/

You can!

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedHome

I'm confused, can't Dropbox still read your files?

One could (in theory) use Dropbox to store the encrypted ~/.Private directory. For example by making it a symlink pointing into the Dropbox directory. And it could be auto-mounted using the Encrypted Private feature at ~/Private. It would probably work very well as ecryptfs only does file-by-file encryption, and thus Dropbox can efficiently track changes.

I almost stopped using Dropbox when they hired C. Rice on the board of directors. I blogged over a few week period about finding alternatives.

After the bump to 1 terabyte of storage I decided to keep using them, with a few procedures: any thing sensitive gets encrypted and the encrypted files get copied to appropriate Dropbox sub folders. This includes a ton of stuff: any customer work materials, backups of non open source software projects, records, etc. then there is a ton of stuff that I don't consider sensitive, so unencrypted is fine: purchased movies, music ever and books; all the photographs I take, archival of research material found on the web, etc.

BTW, Dropbox saves a ton of money by de duplicating files, so encrypting stuff on the client side costs them extra money.

I'm not sure how much they save with deduplication. Dropbox is very expensive per GB, so people don't back up system files etc., and they preemptively block sharing of copyrighted files. What deduplication can they do on a large scale? I don't think I have even one file in my Dropbox account that can be deduplicated.

You can have copyrighted files uploaded, I believe you can even share them with another account. What you can't do is get a public download link for a copyrighted file. I guess the latter cuts some of the motivation, but plenty of people are still going to be putting those files into the dropboxes.

This gives me a funny feeling.

For any other company, I'd say those are good news. However, given their latest change to the Board of Directors, I cannot help but think "I bet this has a backdoor somewhere".

I guess that says more about me than about them, though.

You're not alone.

They've lost a lot of trust and respect from people who haven't forgotten the nightmare Rice helped bring to America and the world that continues to ruin, compromise and endanger lives to this day.

Bringing someone like her on board who also championed warrantless wiretapping and suspicionless spying on all Americans had to be one of the most bizarre moves possible for a cloud hosting company like Dropbox. It makes me wonder what other moves this company has made in the background regarding privacy that we still don't know about.

What are your objections to Bob Mylod?

I thing probably_wrong is more likely to object to the appointment Conoleezza Rice, despite this no longer being the latest change: http://www.drop-dropbox.com/

I can recommend Seafile as self-hosted FOSS file/dir sync tool. Been using it for a year now and I am really happy[1].

[1] Except for the ridiculous decision of not syncing any files with names that are not Windows-compatible anywhere.

BoxCryptor provides client-side encryption on top of Dropbox and Box

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