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Spider Oak - Please stop describing your service as "Zero Knowledge" unless and until you deploy a service that is actually is. E2E encryption great, but it is

by Canada 10y ago

Spider Oak - Please stop describing your service as "Zero Knowledge" unless and until you deploy a service that is actually is. E2E encryption great, but it is not the same thing.

Jivanyan 10y ago
Following to their architectural design, they do not get access to any encryption key and no key leaves user device in unprotected form. Is not this enough to be advertised as "zero-knowledge" service provider?
- federicobond 10y ago
  No, that's called end-to-end or client-side encryption. Zero-knowledge is a property of a certain class of methods that allow one party to prove to another that a certain statement is true, without revealing anything else about it.
- geofft 10y ago
  The term "zero knowledge" has a specific technical meaning in cryptography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof Passing encrypted data through a storage device isn't a "zero-knowledge protocol" in a cryptographic sense, it's just normal cryptography.
- danbruc 10y ago
  As a technical term zero-knowledge has a very specific meaning [1] and is not what they are using. Here it is just a marketing term and may confuse people knowing about the technical meaning but that is certainly only a very small fraction of the population and so it is probably not a huge issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
  - bad_user 10y ago
    That's kind of bullshit though, you can't claim 2 common words from the English language in order to only describe a concept many of us don't understand. I'm a software developer, have been for 15 years, I've stayed fairly awake in college during my cryptography classes, have implemented hashing functions (mentioning this because such a history already place somebody in the 0.01%) and I've never heard of "zero knowledge proof". Not surprisingly, the link you've given is about a phrase with 3 words in it, not 2. And while I've always been annoyed about overloads of "open source", at least that's a words association that you won't hear from non-technical folks and that wasn't in use before OSI happened. And even so, note that OSI couldn't trademark it.
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Just because people don't know the term doesn't mean cryptographers don't know the term; any cryptographer with any formal cryptography training has heard of the term, and it's not used to refer to any other concept in the cryptographic literature. The usage of the term matters when it'll be cryptographers reviewing the work; almost every thread about SpiderOak I've seen calls them out on misleading marketing. Hardly good for PR.
  - carussell 10y ago
    Your link is for zero-knowledge proof. They aren't claiming anything in the realm of proofs, zero-knowledge or not. If "zero-knowledge" implicitly meant "zero-knowledge proof", there would be no reason to ever use the latter phrase. Zero-knowledge is an adjective. It's a modifier. It's the "proof" part in "zero-knowledge proof" that's important in describing what it is. "Zero-knowledge" is a property of the method employed. The irony is that, wrt the original comment, it's end-to-end encryption that would be a misleading and misapplied label. I'm not affiliated with this company and I've never even used this service before, and yet it's immediately clear what zero-knowledge means in the context of a cloud storage provider: you never need divulge your keys, so the question of whether you trust your provider or not is moot. Back when Firefox Sync first launched, I was chasing the idea of referring to it and any similar service as "zero-trust" systems. But building a service and referring to it as "zero-knowledge cloud storage" is totally acceptable.
    - danbruc 10y ago
      Not sure whether I was clear enough, but I understand both sides of the argument. It is a very specific technical term and the zero-knowledge proof Wikipedia article states that zero-knowledge is the name of one of three properties that zero-knowledge proof have to satisfy, on the other hand it is also a nice, catchy and probably understandable marketing term if you want to express that you know (almost) nothing about the users' data. Developer me would certainly prefer technical accuracy but we all know that users certainly could not care less what is the technically correct name for the thing. So I don't care at all whether they call it zero-knowledge or not, they are not trying to trick anybody into believing they are doing zero-knowledge stuff in the cryptographic sense. I actually like zero-trust but I can see how this could easily be interpreted in the wrong way, should or must not be trusted instead of need not be trusted.
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Zero knowledge means a very specific thing in cryptography, and is used exclusively to refer to zero knowledge proofs; in all of cryptographic literature over the past 25 years I have not seen any other usage of "zero knowledge". Either way, this system isn't "zero knowledge", even if that term were well defined for this situation; you leak file sizes and access patterns.
jvehent 10y ago
In cryptography, "zero knowledge" means something very different than "service providers cannot access cleartext data". > In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof z.cash is a zero knowledge system and has a good definition of it on its FAQ: > Zero knowledge proofs are a scientific breakthrough in the field of cryptography: they allow you to prove knowledge of some facts about hidden information without revealing that information. The property of allowing both verifiability and privacy of data makes for a strong use case in all kinds of transactions, and we’re integrating this concept into a block chain for encrypting the sender address, the recipient address, and the amount. A block chain that encrypts transaction data (making it private) and lacks zero-knowledge proofs also lacks the assurance that all the transactions are valid. This is because the nodes in the network can’t determine whether the sender really had that money or whether they previously sent it to someone else, or never had it in the first place. The encrypted data becomes unverifiable by network nodes. source: https://z.cash/support/faq.html?page=0 https://z.cash/support/faq.html?page=0
- trendia 10y ago
  A lot of customers are going to assume that zero knowledge means no cleartext data is ever stored. I assumed it, and I'm no newbie. This seems to be an abuse of the motte and bailey kind: they use a word which everyone believes means one thing, but when questioned they resort to a less commok definition because they 'didn't mean it that way.'
rarrrrrr 10y ago
SpiderOak founder here... A few cryptographers have noticed SpiderOak's marketing term Zero Knowledge is inconsistent with the academic definition. Maybe it doesn't mean what we think it means[1]? SpiderOak was one of the first companies to use this phrase commercially and the need has only grown stronger. At the heart of the issue is the difficulty for end users to decipher the terms cloud vendors use to describe their security. Doing so would require discrimination between transport encryption, data encryption, meta data encryption, encryption at rest vs. in motion, and then most importantly evaluate key management and access. This vocabulary is foreign to most folks. Vendors often exploit the inaccessibility of these topics to make a series of statements that, while often factually correct individually, together create a false sense of privacy. SpiderOak launched a online backup product for Linux, Mac, and Windows in 2007. The competitors were companies like Xdrive, Mozy, Carbonite and SugarSync. Each claimed that customer data was fully encrypted. Even the most credible journalists writing for well funded publications with fact checking budgets were fooled and repeated these misleading claims to end users. [2] In 2009 when Dropbox launched, they made misleading claims about the encryption of customer files and their internal ability to access customer's data or provide that data to 3rd parties, leading to a well publicized FTC deceptive trade practices complaint. [3] The deception had been so effective that leading software engineers were shocked to discover Dropbox had full access to the data they had stored online. [4] In response to customer requests on one of their forums, Mozy explained why it would be "impossible" for a storage service to protect users' privacy by encrypting the file and folder names customers store in a way Mozy could not read. SpiderOak customers had benefited from the impossible for years. Recently Slack made the unbelievable claim on Twitter that their service includes end to end encryption (it doesn't.) Perhaps they mean from your end to their end? Lately there's a new phrase "customer managed keys" used by cloud providers, which sounds really great, but is typically just elaborate hand waving that ultimately allows the vendor and their staff the same level of data access as if it were not encrypted. In 2007 we found ourselves frequently explaining "we don't know the names of your files, the names of your folders, the date they were created or last modified or accessed, their size, their checksums or hashes... in short we know nothing about your data except how much you store." We started using the phrase Zero Knowledge as a headline to this long explanation. It's important to recognize that cryptographers already understand encryption and the terminology is intended for everyday folks. When I'm speaking with a technologist about how SpiderOak products work, I would typically use the phrase end to end encryption. If we want to end mass surveillance, the only way this can happen is through viral adoption of end to end encrypted products and services. Great UX, education, and terminology are powerful tools, and unlike phrases involving the word "encryption", to my knowledge no company has yet been shameless enough to deceptively use the term Zero Knowledge. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk [2] http://allthingsd.com/20080403/sugarsync-offers-the-best-method-yet-for-replicating-files/ http://allthingsd.com/20080403/sugarsync-offers-the-best-met... [3] https://www.wired.com/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/ https://www.wired.com/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/ [4] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Apr-19.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Apr-19.html
unstatusthequo 10y ago
Have you built something better? Its amusing to hear comments like this when there are really no commercially available alternatives that come close without managing your own. My time is much too valuable to run my own. If yours isn't, build one and share it and charge and market it using your favorite parlance and consider avoidin trolling the one company that's at least trying not to suck.

by Canada 10y ago

Spider Oak - Please stop describing your service as "Zero Knowledge" unless and until you deploy a service that is actually is. E2E encryption great, but it is not the same thing.

Jivanyan 10y ago

Following to their architectural design, they do not get access to any encryption key and no key leaves user device in unprotected form. Is not this enough to be advertised as "zero-knowledge" service provider?

federicobond 10y ago
No, that's called end-to-end or client-side encryption. Zero-knowledge is a property of a certain class of methods that allow one party to prove to another that a certain statement is true, without revealing anything else about it.
geofft 10y ago
The term "zero knowledge" has a specific technical meaning in cryptography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof Passing encrypted data through a storage device isn't a "zero-knowledge protocol" in a cryptographic sense, it's just normal cryptography.
danbruc 10y ago
As a technical term zero-knowledge has a very specific meaning [1] and is not what they are using. Here it is just a marketing term and may confuse people knowing about the technical meaning but that is certainly only a very small fraction of the population and so it is probably not a huge issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
- bad_user 10y ago
  That's kind of bullshit though, you can't claim 2 common words from the English language in order to only describe a concept many of us don't understand. I'm a software developer, have been for 15 years, I've stayed fairly awake in college during my cryptography classes, have implemented hashing functions (mentioning this because such a history already place somebody in the 0.01%) and I've never heard of "zero knowledge proof". Not surprisingly, the link you've given is about a phrase with 3 words in it, not 2. And while I've always been annoyed about overloads of "open source", at least that's a words association that you won't hear from non-technical folks and that wasn't in use before OSI happened. And even so, note that OSI couldn't trademark it.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Just because people don't know the term doesn't mean cryptographers don't know the term; any cryptographer with any formal cryptography training has heard of the term, and it's not used to refer to any other concept in the cryptographic literature. The usage of the term matters when it'll be cryptographers reviewing the work; almost every thread about SpiderOak I've seen calls them out on misleading marketing. Hardly good for PR.
- carussell 10y ago
  Your link is for zero-knowledge proof. They aren't claiming anything in the realm of proofs, zero-knowledge or not. If "zero-knowledge" implicitly meant "zero-knowledge proof", there would be no reason to ever use the latter phrase. Zero-knowledge is an adjective. It's a modifier. It's the "proof" part in "zero-knowledge proof" that's important in describing what it is. "Zero-knowledge" is a property of the method employed. The irony is that, wrt the original comment, it's end-to-end encryption that would be a misleading and misapplied label. I'm not affiliated with this company and I've never even used this service before, and yet it's immediately clear what zero-knowledge means in the context of a cloud storage provider: you never need divulge your keys, so the question of whether you trust your provider or not is moot. Back when Firefox Sync first launched, I was chasing the idea of referring to it and any similar service as "zero-trust" systems. But building a service and referring to it as "zero-knowledge cloud storage" is totally acceptable.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Not sure whether I was clear enough, but I understand both sides of the argument. It is a very specific technical term and the zero-knowledge proof Wikipedia article states that zero-knowledge is the name of one of three properties that zero-knowledge proof have to satisfy, on the other hand it is also a nice, catchy and probably understandable marketing term if you want to express that you know (almost) nothing about the users' data. Developer me would certainly prefer technical accuracy but we all know that users certainly could not care less what is the technically correct name for the thing. So I don't care at all whether they call it zero-knowledge or not, they are not trying to trick anybody into believing they are doing zero-knowledge stuff in the cryptographic sense. I actually like zero-trust but I can see how this could easily be interpreted in the wrong way, should or must not be trusted instead of need not be trusted.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Zero knowledge means a very specific thing in cryptography, and is used exclusively to refer to zero knowledge proofs; in all of cryptographic literature over the past 25 years I have not seen any other usage of "zero knowledge". Either way, this system isn't "zero knowledge", even if that term were well defined for this situation; you leak file sizes and access patterns.

jvehent 10y ago

In cryptography, "zero knowledge" means something very different than "service providers cannot access cleartext data". > In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof z.cash is a zero knowledge system and has a good definition of it on its FAQ: > Zero knowledge proofs are a scientific breakthrough in the field of cryptography: they allow you to prove knowledge of some facts about hidden information without revealing that information. The property of allowing both verifiability and privacy of data makes for a strong use case in all kinds of transactions, and we’re integrating this concept into a block chain for encrypting the sender address, the recipient address, and the amount. A block chain that encrypts transaction data (making it private) and lacks zero-knowledge proofs also lacks the assurance that all the transactions are valid. This is because the nodes in the network can’t determine whether the sender really had that money or whether they previously sent it to someone else, or never had it in the first place. The encrypted data becomes unverifiable by network nodes. source: https://z.cash/support/faq.html?page=0 https://z.cash/support/faq.html?page=0

trendia 10y ago
A lot of customers are going to assume that zero knowledge means no cleartext data is ever stored. I assumed it, and I'm no newbie. This seems to be an abuse of the motte and bailey kind: they use a word which everyone believes means one thing, but when questioned they resort to a less commok definition because they 'didn't mean it that way.'

rarrrrrr 10y ago

SpiderOak founder here... A few cryptographers have noticed SpiderOak's marketing term Zero Knowledge is inconsistent with the academic definition. Maybe it doesn't mean what we think it means[1]? SpiderOak was one of the first companies to use this phrase commercially and the need has only grown stronger. At the heart of the issue is the difficulty for end users to decipher the terms cloud vendors use to describe their security. Doing so would require discrimination between transport encryption, data encryption, meta data encryption, encryption at rest vs. in motion, and then most importantly evaluate key management and access. This vocabulary is foreign to most folks. Vendors often exploit the inaccessibility of these topics to make a series of statements that, while often factually correct individually, together create a false sense of privacy. SpiderOak launched a online backup product for Linux, Mac, and Windows in 2007. The competitors were companies like Xdrive, Mozy, Carbonite and SugarSync. Each claimed that customer data was fully encrypted. Even the most credible journalists writing for well funded publications with fact checking budgets were fooled and repeated these misleading claims to end users. [2] In 2009 when Dropbox launched, they made misleading claims about the encryption of customer files and their internal ability to access customer's data or provide that data to 3rd parties, leading to a well publicized FTC deceptive trade practices complaint. [3] The deception had been so effective that leading software engineers were shocked to discover Dropbox had full access to the data they had stored online. [4] In response to customer requests on one of their forums, Mozy explained why it would be "impossible" for a storage service to protect users' privacy by encrypting the file and folder names customers store in a way Mozy could not read. SpiderOak customers had benefited from the impossible for years. Recently Slack made the unbelievable claim on Twitter that their service includes end to end encryption (it doesn't.) Perhaps they mean from your end to their end? Lately there's a new phrase "customer managed keys" used by cloud providers, which sounds really great, but is typically just elaborate hand waving that ultimately allows the vendor and their staff the same level of data access as if it were not encrypted. In 2007 we found ourselves frequently explaining "we don't know the names of your files, the names of your folders, the date they were created or last modified or accessed, their size, their checksums or hashes... in short we know nothing about your data except how much you store." We started using the phrase Zero Knowledge as a headline to this long explanation. It's important to recognize that cryptographers already understand encryption and the terminology is intended for everyday folks. When I'm speaking with a technologist about how SpiderOak products work, I would typically use the phrase end to end encryption. If we want to end mass surveillance, the only way this can happen is through viral adoption of end to end encrypted products and services. Great UX, education, and terminology are powerful tools, and unlike phrases involving the word "encryption", to my knowledge no company has yet been shameless enough to deceptively use the term Zero Knowledge. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk [2] http://allthingsd.com/20080403/sugarsync-offers-the-best-method-yet-for-replicating-files/ http://allthingsd.com/20080403/sugarsync-offers-the-best-met... [3] https://www.wired.com/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/ https://www.wired.com/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/ [4] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Apr-19.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Apr-19.html

unstatusthequo 10y ago

Have you built something better? Its amusing to hear comments like this when there are really no commercially available alternatives that come close without managing your own. My time is much too valuable to run my own. If yours isn't, build one and share it and charge and market it using your favorite parlance and consider avoidin trolling the one company that's at least trying not to suck.