Slashdot Mirror
Dropbox Can't See Your Dat– Er, Never Mind
bizwriter writes "Dropbox, the online backup and file sharing service claims to have hit 25 million users in a single year. But a change in terms, noting that Dropbox will give up data to law enforcement under a legal request, showed that the company's security claims couldn't be possible. It turns out that Dropbox claims in one place that encrypted data makes it impossible for employees to see into user files, but in another says that they're only 'prohibited' from doing so."
Everyday I get a corporate client asking me why they can't just do all their work on the cloud. Here's the perfect reason why.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
How does Dropbox define "valid legal process"? Do they mean something like, I don't know, receiving an actual search warrant? Or do they mean rolling over when the police say, "Hey, um, we'd just like to look at all these users' files. We have no warrant or real reason to do so, but we think someone might potentially be doing something illegal and we promise we're only working to 'protect' people and all that jazz."
Keep your eyes to the sky.
Of course it can be impossible. Encrypt the data yourself, using a well-known, open-source, trusted and verified program, and keep the keys yourself. Dropbox can't decrypt anything then. Why anyone would trust them in the first place, especially a smart guy like Miguel, is beyond me.
Dropbox lied. No two ways about it. But this why you never store anything sensitive in "the cloud" anyway.
Agile Artisans
Maybe it comes from working in IT, but I always assume that if someone else is holding my data, they can access it. It doesn't interest me what they say - that's my basic starting assumption. So I always assumed that Dropbox could get to my data, and if I cared about the privacy of that data I just encrypted the files myself first.
It's my data, I'm in control of it. Giving it up to someone else and hoping they keep it safe is silly.
I'm surprised so many people are surprised (and I wonder if the people are are surprised haven't been in IT long?)
Seriously, is anyone really surprised by this? I use DropBox, and not once have I considered that my data in DropBox is completely private. Sure, I use it for transferring some documents that are potentially sensitive (a lot of documentation on a lawsuit I'm involved in for example) but where there's sensitive data I always encrypt the documents myself with TrueCrypt.
This is precisely why I think the "cloud" is a bad idea for corporations. Until there are guarantees and safeguards against data theft or loss there is no way that I would entrust my company's critical data to a third party provider. Yes, the costs of managing that data myself are higher but the risk of that data getting out of our control and management is greatly mitigated.
And what about a data breach? Loss of data due to crackers? Seriously... all it's going to take is for one of these cloud providers to become big enough that the majority of corporations using their services are completely without options when a breach occurs. The big provider can simply turn around and say "Well, crap happens but who else are you going to turn to?" and there's nothing the average corporation can do about it. There may be financial guarantees in place, but simply put the cat is already out of the bag at that point.
They're not lying, they're just being careful with their words and people can't read.
It should be obvious to any technically-minded person that they hold any encryption keys, since when you install Dropbox on a second computer, you don't need to provide a key in order for it to be successful.
So their claims are that they encrypt data in transit, encrypt data at rest, and that employees can't access the content of files. There's no claim that it's impossible for any employee to access the content of files because they're encrypted with a key Dropbox doesn't hold, which is what people seem to be imagining. It's simply saying that employees won't snoop on your files because in the normal course of business, they are not provided access with the contents of those files.
As far as providing the files to law enforcement upon a legally-valid request, they don't really have a choice in the matter, as they're a US company. For any company that exists primarily in country X, it is almost certain that there is a relatively easy procedure for law enforcement agents of country X to obtain any data about you that the company holds. If the country happens to be, say, Lithuania, and you don't travel to or do business in Lithuania, you probably don't care, but it's still true. The only way to prevent this is to make it so that the company is not holding any useful data of yours that they are able to access. In the case of Dropbox, you need to encrypt your files before they get to Dropbox.
Incidentally, if you have data that you don't want law enforcement to be able to obtain, you should be encrypting it even when it's stored locally. A search warrant for your computer is not really all that much harder to obtain.