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BitTorrent Sees Sync Users Share Over 1PB of Data
An anonymous reader writes with an update on the rapid adoption of BitTorrent Lab's Sync tool. From the article: "BitTorrent on Monday announced an impressive milestone for its file synchronization tool Sync: users have synced over 1PB of data. The company says over 70 terabytes are synced via the tool every day. BitTorrent first announced its Sync software back in January and released a private alpha. Between then and April 23, when the company release a public alpha, users synced over 200TB worth of data. In other words, over the past 13 days users have synced over 800TB of data. At this rate, the service will pass 10PB before even hitting a stable release."
I guess that's why it was closed-source only?
The fact that you in turn save encrypted copies of their data.
You only share among people with same shared key. So, no, you are not spreading your encrypted file to other people. At 1:1 it's pretty much direct peer-to-peer transfer. If more nodes are participating, then it can leverage distributed transfers from other nodes that may have part of the whole part of a file.
I might be wrong but I was under the understanding that it is primarily aimed at syncing your own data between your own devices (think Dropbox but without a centralised file server). You could choose to sync it with other users but they would then have access to your unencrypted data.
My understanding is that your data is only sync'd among your own computers. Specifically, when you create a shared folder, it has an associated secret (random string used as an encryption key), and only computers that have that secret have a copy of the data.
Indeed, I thought this was going to be the perfect thing for say two friends to use as a backup method between each other - not so much a randon anyone on the internets has the backup... If it does pick users off the internet, I am less interested in it - I thought the concept of peer to peer based backup (but selecting your peers) was brilliant.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
FYI, they're transferring file blocks based on their hash. They aren't doing delta comparisons as this would require you to cache the previous version of the file. So if you insert a byte at the start of your file, expect the whole thing to be re-transferred.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
You only share among people with same shared key. So, no, you are not spreading your encrypted file to other people.
At 1:1 it's pretty much direct peer-to-peer transfer. If more nodes are participating, then it can leverage distributed transfers from other nodes that may have part of the whole part of a file.
I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like Sync may accomplish the very significant task of getting users to easily share and manage (and use) keys like it was just something you do while working with your files.
That would be far more significant than merely attaching a distributed filesystem to a P2P protocol.
From reading the descriptions on the sync site... no. Anyone with the key can access the files. This provides some security, but it is pretty brittle. As long as everyone using it understands the level of security that should be applied to that key. i.e. anyone who steals the key can access the files. So, for example, never send the key over email.
This seems like a reasonable solution for either just syncing personal files, where one individual has control of the key(s). Or syncing among a small technical group where everyone understands the relevance of the security of the key(s). Or syncing low-risk files among a less formal group. So it provides "some security" but you shouldn't really call it "secure", where "secure" would be per-user authenticated based on unique, private credentials for each user that they will not, in practice, give to others.