Lockbox Aims To NSA-Proof the Cloud

Daniel_Stuckey writes "Lockbox, a tech startup founded in 2008, just received $2.5 million in seed funding for its end-to-end encryption cloud service, Client Portal. So, how does end-to-end cloud encryption work? Lockbox encrypts and compresses files before they are uploaded to the cloud. Only a person in possession of the corresponding key can unlock, or decrypt, the files. This means that the NSA, malicious hackers, business competitors, and even crazy girlfriends and boyfriends won't be be able to peer into users' most sensitive and private files."

Comments

Re:I like the idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Tarsnap should also be mentioned in this context. It's a business started by Colin Percival, noted cryptographer and BSD developer. The client is 100% open source and runs on your machine. When Colin developed Tarsnap he found existing key derivation functions lacking, so he developed his own memory hard scrypt, which has found wide applications in other areas.

The major problem with "encrypted cloud" solutions is that encryption severely limits what can be done in the cloud. You can basically do encrypted file storage. You can't run virus or spam filters on your data, you can't index it and search it etc. So all the useful features we have in a Gmail session need to awkwardly and inefficiently be re-implemented on the client side.

The providers have very little incentive to do this and transform ad supported free services into paid ones (since data mining no longer works, ad revenue drops dramatically). While I would love encrypted email for everyone, it just won't happen for economic reasons. The NSA affair will be quickly forgotten and people will return to business as usual.

Re:I like the idea

[TheRaven64]

Full homomorphic encryption is really hard. Homomorphic encryption allows you to encrypt your data, do some computation on the result, and then perform some operation on the output to get the same result as doing the operation on the unencrypted data. Current solutions are at least a factor of 1000 slower than doing it on unencrypted data, but that's only for general case. There are ways of encrypting data that preserve certain properties so you can, for example, perform simple database operations on it in the encrypted form and only interpret the results if you hold the keys. The down side of these approaches is that they increase the size (effectively doubling it for every primitive operation that you want to support), but with storage becoming cheap they may become interesting...