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We will no longer use the phrase “zero knowledge” to describe our software
- cmrx64 10y agoDear god FINALLY. This has annoyed me constantly about spideroak.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago"Your data is completely safe from ... any threat." How is that possible?
- dredmorbius 10y agoIt's not. It's probably relatively safe at rest from compromise on the server(s). Endpoint attacks (users' own systems), or some form of targeted client update (e.g., client code that's dropped to individual users), either by SpiderOak or through other means (MITM / cert hijacking) strike me as plausible routes.
- jml7c5 10y agoFrom context I assume they mean threat levied against the company or data entrusted to it. They should probably change it to "any server-side threat", or just nix that portion entirely. (Nixing it is probably most reasonable, given that they could theoretically push an update that steals secret keys, AFAIK.)
- mavhc 10y agoBecause they don't have your data, they have your encrypted data and no key. Last week I emailed the Information Commissioner's Office in the United Kingdom https://ico.org.uk/ https://ico.org.uk/ about whether, in their view, storing encrypted backups in another country, when the key never leaves the UK, counts as moving personal data outside the country, sadly they said yes, I don't really have faith they understood the maths though.
- msh 10y agoMaybe they understand the theory but have no means of verifying the implementation, while its easier to verify the location of data.
- mavhc 10y agoThey don't really verify things anyway, they wait for people to inform them of issues. Encryption can be broken, but, one assumes: a) that your backups aren't likely to be stolen, b) that no one cares enough and c) by the time they are, the people whose information you stored are dead If you logged in you provided the key: NOTE: Logging in via the SpiderOak website does temporarily allow SpiderOak employees access to your password. Due to this exposure, we discourage users from entering your password online if they wish to fully retain our Zero-Knowledge privacy.
- icebraining 10y agoEncryption can be broken, especially in the long run.
- warrenmiller 10y agoIf they have no key how come I can login and download files from the web UI without providing my key?
- trendia 10y agoPreviously [0], HN and experts criticized SpiderOak for using the term improperly in their marketing. (E2E is not the same as zero-knowledge storage). And now they admit that they knew at the time that it was used improperly. So, why did they use it? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301936
- passive 10y agoThis is misleading. They admitted at the time they knew it was being used improperly, they were just attached to the usage. They are now following up to say they have detached themselves from this usage. This seems like very responsible behaviour that should be applauded.
- trendia 10y agoI'm pointing out that they knowlingly used a word improperly... and for that I am called misleading.
- Mz 10y agoSo, why did they use it? I do not know why, but good marketing and technical accuracy can easily clash. Even just trying to communicate generally can be tripped up by different uses of the same term. You tend to find that out by stepping in it, not by somehow knowing ahead of time that X term will be drama for some reason.
- aboodman 10y agoI'm always a little tweaked when somebody pitching a client product says "we can't access your data". Am I running your software in a process that has network access? Then you can access my data. I understand the point you're trying to make, and I totally get that architecting a system so that unencrypted data doesn't leave my device is superior to an architecture where it does. But I still must, ultimately, trust you, your competence, and your motivations. If I trust that you don't want to access my data, and have tried to architect your systems so that is hard to do, and are competent to do so, then I can trust my data is probably safe. But that's not the same as it being physically impossible for you to access my data.
- hueving 10y agoWell it depends on if you can run the software in an isolated network. I can trust client software a lot more that can run on a machine isolated from Internet access. If someone pitches a product like that to me, then I can proceed without really having to trust them.
- aboodman 10y agoI said that -- "process with network access". If I'm running your software, and there exists any channel by which that software can talk to you, then ultimately you can access whatever that software has access to.
- hueving 10y ago"network access" is not the same as "Internet access". It seems pedantic, but there are very large networks with no connectivity to the Internet.
- Alex3917 10y ago> I'm always a little tweaked when somebody pitching a client product says "we can't access your data". If their privacy policy prevents them from accessing your data unless authorized, then this isn't an unreasonable statement. Often a company needs data for a certain purpose, but there is no good technical solution for enforcing that. This is where privacy policies can benefit users, by providing a legal agreement to protect users beyond the abilities of the underlying technology.
- ape4 10y ago"As we launch a new website today, we changed every mention of Zero Knowledge to No Knowledge."
- CiPHPerCoder 10y agoIn case anyone is curious about why this was problematic: https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/crypto-misnomers-zero-knowledge-considered-self-descriptive https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/crypto-misnomers-zero-kno... Zero Knowledge is something you're most likely going to find in an authentication protocol, not an encryption protocol. While I have mixed feelings about "No Knowledge", it's at least not a collision with a different concept. Good on SpiderOak for the effort here. It shows they do listen, at the very least.
- rarrrrrr 10y agoThank you. It would be easier to create friendly terms that describe end-to-end encryption if non-encrypted cloud providers weren't actively trying to mislead people into a false sense of security. My previous rant about this is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303599
- _cxqp 10y agoI still won't trust SpiderOak with my data. Their service is unreliable and slow, their client is horrible to work with and their support is disgraceful. I'll post my usual story: In February 2016, SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I connected, set up the SpiderOak client and started uploading. However I noticed something odd. According to my Mac's activity monitor, SpiderOak was only uploading in short bursts [0] of ~2MB/s. I did some test uploads to other services (Google Drive, Amazon) to verify that things were fine with my connection (they were) and then contacted support (Feb 10). What followed was nearly 6 months of "support", first claiming that it might be a server side issue and moving me "to a new host" (Feb 17) then when that didn't resolve my issue, they ignored me for a couple of months then handed me over to an engineer (Apr 28) who told me: "we may have your uploads running at the maximum speed we can offer you at the moment. Additional changes to storage network configuration will not improve the situation much. There is an overhead limitation when the client encrypts, deduplicates, and compresses the files you are uploading" At this point I ran a basic test (cat /dev/urandom | gzip -c | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pass pass:spideroak | pv | shasum -a 256 > /dev/zero) that showed my laptop was easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than SpiderOak was handling it (Apr 30) after which I was simply ignored for a full month until I opened another ticket asking for a refund (Jul 9). I really love the idea of secure, private storage but SpiderOak's client is barely functional and their customer support is rather bad. If you want a service like theirs, I'd suggest rolling your own. Rclone [1] and Syncany [2] are both open source and support end to end encryption and a variety of storage backends. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/XEvhIop.png http://i.imgur.com/XEvhIop.png [1]: http://rclone.org/ http://rclone.org/ [2]: https://www.syncany.org/ https://www.syncany.org/
- BadassFractal 10y agoWould you say those two last tools are the best option as of today as far as using open source to conveniently store zero knowledge bits on S3? Haven't looked into the space much before but I'd gladly get rid of spideroak if I could self host it.
- raphinou 10y agoI was surprised to read their mobile solution delegates the decryption to a software running on their server: https://spideroak.com/manual/spideroak-on-mobile https://spideroak.com/manual/spideroak-on-mobile This is clearly not "no Knowledge".... Looking forward to standing corrected if I am wrong.
- MertsA 10y agoAFAIK, they make this very clear if you ever try to use the mobile content that you're giving them access to all of your data. I think there's a sufficient amount of big scary warnings and from the way SpiderOak is designed it makes sense to me why a true mobile client wouldn't work out so well.
- placebo 10y agoI think in terms of catchy marketing phrases, its a good switch, considering they wanted one that sounds as good as the previous one yet does not clash with existing professional terminology. I remember thinking for a few seconds about what I would change it to back when reading criticism about them using the term "Zero Knowledge" and couldn't off the top of my head think of something different but still catchy. Seems obvious once it's thought of...
- ianmiers 10y agoI think this is missing the larger problem with the claim. Yes, using the term clashed with academic cryptography to some extent. But the larger issue was even as they intended to use it, it's not a completely accurate description of their product. They learn quite a bit of information compared to you storing the data locally. Why the collision with academic cryptography doesn't matter: Anyone who had even a basic understanding of their product + some academic crypto background would get what they were going for: they have no knowledge of whats going on. Also, strictly speaking,the academic term is zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge proof of knowledge. Ie, zero-knowledge is an adjective used to describe a proof (and indeed, if you look at the history of how these evolved, that is exactly what happened). You could reasonably use zero-knowledge as a modifier for something else and it could be acceptable. Indeed, it's a fairly good shorthand for a particular class of definitions of privacy/confidentiality that require any transcript of the protocol can be produced by a simulator who has no knowledge of what transpired. The problem is Spider Oak's cloud backup cannot be zero-knowledge or no knowledge. It almost certainly leaks when you update files and when you delete them. Perhaps they don't log this or delete the logs, but they could. And this meta data could matter to businesses.
- rarrrrrr 10y agoYes, of course there's some traffic analysis that would be possible, as there would be with any such service. But for the record: we keep logs for a limited time, and we don't just encrypt each file individually. Instead there's an encrypted journal and encrypted data blocks. (Having the additional layer of data blocks allows for better deduplicating one version of a file to the next.) So for each transaction that's uploaded to the servers, we know that the journal gets longer, and that data blocks are added or removed (or both.) All the database work for keeping track of the data blocks (reference accounting, garbage collection) is done client side. More details in this post from 2009: https://spideroak.com/articles/why--how-spideroak-architecture-is-different-than-other-online-storage-services https://spideroak.com/articles/why--how-spideroak-architectu...
- s-macke 10y agoThis is pretty impressive. I thought that you only encrypt content and filename. But this goes way beyond what I expected from such a service.
- s-macke 10y agoFor me the problem with Zero Knowledge or No Knowledge is, that the website usually don't say, whether they encrypt the content, directory structure, filename or file size. Often it is just the content. It would be great if the services would explain this in more detail. What does SpiderOak encrypt actually? I guess a real "No knowledge" storage would be just a container and you read and write blocks, i. e. the filesystem format is implemented on the client side. Of course this make features such as versioning difficult to implement and probable everything would be a little bit slower. Edit: The post from rarrrrrr explains the technique of Spider Oak and he links to a Blog entry. This is pretty impressive.
- rarrrrrr 10y agoYour second paragraph describes SpiderOak quite accurately: it is exactly a logical file system implemented client side, with all the database work to support that done locally. It works because Sqlite is awesome.
- barking 10y agoI have been using sync.com for about a year now and am very happy with it. It says it's zero knowledge (I'm not qualified to judge the veracity of that) and costs under €60 pa for 500GB. I have also found them exceptionally friendly to deal with. It's ridiculous but I was chuffed to receive a postcard signed by about a dozen people after signing up. I used to use crashplan but after doing a successful restore from a supposedly good archive I found that thousands of files were missing. The other thing I use as was mentioned elsewhere in this thread is duplicati 2. Has worked perfectly for me so far.
- DylanFuery 10y agoJust got my postcard as well! Sadly no signatures but lots of stickers. I love me some stickers. Really enjoying their service so far, and with them I can actually visually see what's happening (encryption and uploading) whereas SpiderOak makes it less clear / obvious.
- barking 10y agoMaybe they were a little quieter back then or maybe they just liked me more? What can I say? :)
- sauronlord 10y agoOdd, but they used "zero knowledge" in their title to describe themselves. Anyone else pick up on this hilarious irony? Hacker News is becoming a comedy site similar to The Onion.
- unknownsavage 10y agoGreat news. I tried spideroak and liked the product, but the inability for me to pay using anonymous payment methods has lead me to use sync.com instead. I had trouble with a prepaid debit card, and they unfortunately don't take bitcoin either.
- abronan 10y agoThis applies to the entire industry, we are often inflating our products with terms that do not describe the reality. Technical accuracy is important because it can drive a purchase decision when comparing features with a competitor. Companies and individuals invest time and money on these software/services, misleading them with inaccuracies can harm them directly or their business. At least it's an honest statement from SpiderOak, it's better to fix a misuse of a term and admit an error than throwing a misleading term describing a product used by thousands of people and then delete it as if nothing happened. When I see this post, I cannot help but think of how Docker described "Swarm mode" orchestration features during DockerCon 2016 using the terms "self-healing" and "self-organizing". Obviously, "Swarm mode" was neither "self-healing" nor "self-organizing" and a possibility is that they had no idea what those terms meant, but it looked good on paper and from a marketing point of view. While they have fixed it in the documentation after pointing this out internally, these terms have leaked in many blog posts and are still in plenty of talks recording on Youtube. It became hopeless to stop the spread of misinformation. Despite this change, a lot of SpiderOak customers are still going to use the term Zero-Knowledge to describe the software to their friend/co-workers or business partners. The term will stick to them for awhile.
- temprature 10y ago> For our secure group chat, file sharing and collaboration tool Semaphor, it means you can even review the source code. Has anyone ever tried to "review the source code"? "review the source code" links to https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/source https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/source which leads to https://spideroak.com/releases/semaphor/source https://spideroak.com/releases/semaphor/source which is a 404.
- Operyl 10y agoIt's worked for me in the past, and still continues to do so.