19 ms·
PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution
- adrianN 8y agoHow does this compare to tarsnap?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- moviuro 8y agotarsnap's target audience is sysadmins and other UNIXy gurus. My grandma and my dad, who would benifit most from a secure sync mechanism would probably be unable to use it. Also, I'm not sure how you can use tarsnap at good cost for p2p sync. [0] https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/
- anoncoward111 8y agotime for me to make a tarsnap gui ?? XD
- dchest 8y agoThere's official GUI https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui
- simias 8y agoTarnsap is for backup, I don't think it can really be used for sync in the general sense. It's also hard to predict how much it's going to cost you if you don't exactly know how much data you're going to upload (and is IMO prohibitively expensive for even moderately-sized backups). I love the tech behind tarnsap, I love that the client is open source, I love the whole philosophy of it but I really struggle with the pricing.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago> the client is open source No, it's source available.
- digianarchist 8y agoHopefully they accept cryptocurrencies which tarsnap no longer supports.
- joekrill 8y agoLooks like it's not actually ready yet? PIA has a great track record, though, so this seems promising. I also like this when you give them your email: >> This is not a mailing list, and your email will be permanently removed after we send a one‑time notification when PrivateStorage is available to the general public.
- comboy 8y agoSo on one hand, you just need some good open source software for that, there's enough cloud and there's no reason you wouldn't choose the cheapest one if you have everything client side encrypted and can add more redundancy. On the other hand.. > the system runs on Tahoe-LAFS that got me very interested.
- moviuro 8y agoFWIW, I've been using syncthing [0] for some years now [1] and am very pleased. Even though my data is unavailable on the cloud from any untrusted computer (like e.g. my corporate laptop), it's synced on my "fleet". I'm not sure that PrivateStorage actually adds anything to the equation? EDIT> The Tahoe LAFS [2] model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or what have you. It feels like RAID in the network, and it allows very precise setting of redundancy policies. So syncthing actually only runs on trusted machines, whereas PrivateStorage will be able to run on both trusted (tightly managed) and untrusted machines (like a VPS in the USA). [0] https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net [1] https://try.popho.be/byeunison.html https://try.popho.be/byeunison.html [2] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs
- zorked 8y agoA big thing is that Tahoe LAFS can be run on untrusted computers.
- moviuro 8y agoSo you share your data on untrusted machines that you bet will live long enough to hold what you want to keep. Sounds risky. Do storage providers have an incentive to provide the service reliably à la filecoin? [0] [0] https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/
- deadbunny 8y agoUntrusted doesn't mean randomly selected.
- zorked 8y agoThe Tahoe LAFS model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or what have you. It feels like RAID in the network, and it allows very precise setting of redundancy policies.
- rakoo 8y ago
- iagovar 8y agoBased in the US apparently. I guess everyone here knows what that means. Not a great jurisdiction if you are concerned by privacy.
- rygxqpbsngav 8y agoStill PIA got good standing in avoiding the data/log access requests so far for their VPN service.
- iagovar 8y agoI'd still lean towards Iceland, Switzerland or Romania, although I'm still not sure if I should trust any EU country over this topics.
- t0astbread 8y agoWhy not?
- iagovar 8y agohttps://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/ https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/ Mostly, but also by some of the news I see over here about parliaments trying with more or less success trying to pass laws to take down websites or force them to comply with questionable reasons. I understand that there could be reasonable arguments behind, but I feel very uneasy about it.
- lotharrr 8y agoLeast Authority is actually a German company now (although it was started in the US): https://leastauthority.com/about-us/ https://leastauthority.com/about-us/
- t0astbread 8y agoInteresting. How does this compare to hosted Nextcloud offerings?
- nickik 8y agoDoes this have a way to only sync partially sync? So if I have my huge music library there, but I only one sync particular folder to my phone?
- ZeroCool2u 8y agoThere are a number of alternative paths in this space if you're truly focused and willing to invest a bit, but if you care about privacy enough to seek a service like this out and just want to minimize mental overhead, this seems like a good choice. Tahoe-LAFS makes some impressive claims like maintaining confidentiality while running on untrusted machines. I think a lot of folks now would assert that really any machine running x86 due to Intel ME and the AMD equivalent should in fact be untrusted. I'm not in a position to criticize though, this is just from a cursory glance at the summary page, and frankly I used PIA as my own VPN provider for a number of years and had only positive experiences.
- lotharrr 8y ago(author of Tahoe here, although I'm not much involved these days) > Tahoe-LAFS makes some impressive claims like maintaining confidentiality while running on untrusted machines. I think a lot of folks now would assert that really any machine running x86 due to Intel ME and the AMD equivalent should in fact be untrusted. To be precise, our claim is that you can use untrusted servers, since the client encrypts the data before it leaves your machine. You are, of course, entirely reliant on your own client being trustworthy. Nothing can save you if your client is compromised, whether via ME, a BIOS infection, an OS rootkit, or a boring old userspace compromise. The Tahoe-LAFS client runs pretty well on ARM and Raspberry PIs, in case that feels better.
- rsync 8y ago"There are a number of alternative paths in this space if you're truly focused and willing to invest a bit, but if you care about privacy enough to seek a service like this out and just want to minimize mental overhead, this seems like a good choice." It feels to me like 'borg'[1] is becoming the de facto standard for this use-case. There were a number of similar tools (like duplicity) for years but borg seems to have buttoned up all of the issues. Some call it the "holy grail of backups".[2] [1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ [2] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
- 8y ago
- tchaffee 8y agoShould anything truly private be stored in the cloud? I have never seen a solution that doesn't boil down to trusting someone. The claim is that the code is open source. But I don't know how I would verify that that's the actual code they are running on their servers. I also don't understand the payoff. For information that's not truly private (like your music collection) but that could possibly be data mined, then a very basic level of privacy you get from something like Dropbox should be enough, right? What does this service offer that other cloud storage providers don't offer? For information that's truly private, why would I risk it becoming eventually available to hackers by putting it somewhere in the cloud? What am I missing?
- lotharrr 8y agoThe data is encrypted on your client before it leaves your computer. You're relying upon the servers to hold onto your ciphertext (i.e. availability), but not to keep it secret (confidentiality). And the client can detect changes to the ciphertext, so you aren't relying upon the servers for integrity either. You have to trust the client code, for sure, but that's something that you're at least nominally in a position to inspect and verify. https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs
- tchaffee 8y agoI'm a programmer. And I still don't think I'm in a position to verify if something is cryptographically secure. It's quite possible that a client has been built with an extremely subtle backdoor already in mind. One that crypto experts won't find for years.
- thinkloop 8y agoYes, but it's like when you're at a cafe and need to go to the bathroom so you ask the random guy next to you to watch your laptop. Sure he could steal it, but you reduced the attack vector to just him.
- 8y ago
- boynamedsue 8y agoThey're calling this service S4 and not expecting to get sued into oblivion by AWS? It's also not very creative. Says a lot about the maturity of their their thinking when there's such obvious naming similarity.
- tyingq 8y agoIt does appear to be based on the phrase "Simple Secure Storage Service". Maybe 4S or SIV would have been better.
- nitrohorse 8y agoI wonder how this compares to Cryptomator [1]. [1] https://cryptomator.org https://cryptomator.org
- cascom 8y agoOr ARQ if it’s just for backup...
- cascom 8y agoWhat is the advantage over ARQ + B2/S3/etc...
- _bxg1 8y agoDoes anyone know what kind of impact client-side encryption would have on sync speed for potentially-large files (as opposed to simple text messages)?
- meejah 8y agoTahoe-LAFS does "erasure coding" on the chunks of data. This increases the size of the data (adding redundancy) so that you can recover a file without recovering every single chunk. These parameters are decided client-side. In the smallest possible case (i.e. every chunk required) there is some slight overhead from the zfec and Tahoe headers. If you are using redundancy of any kind, it will inflate the size of the ciphertext versus the plaintext thus affecting sync speed. Tahoe-LAFS does split everything up into fixed-size chunks, though, so the total size of the file doesn't really matter -- it will still be uploaded in 128kb (default) chunks to the storage servers. So, it's not the encryption that has an impact but the erasure-coding (which gives the "RAID-like" features) and you can configure it to have zero redundancy and thus only some slight increase in the total amount of data to send.
- _bxg1 8y agoHadn't even thought about a difference in size; I was thinking the CPU overhead. If I save a 1GB file, how much processor time will it take to re-encrypt the whole thing so it can be sent off? Or does the chunking apply here too; i.e. only the chunk of the file that's changed has to be re-encrypted?
- meejah 8y agoI don't know the exact answer to that, but "not much" in comparison to the time to send the bytes over the network. The actual contents are encrypted using AES which often has built-in instructions on modern processors and is thus very fast. The vast majority of the time is uploading time here. Tahoe does use "convergent encryption" (basically, the key is based on the contents) so that the same file encrypted by the same client results in the same ciphertext (and thus, doesn't need to be re-uploaded). I believe that only happens at the "capability" (i.e. file) level, though, not each chunk. So, if you had a directory of 10 files each 100MB and changed one, you'd only have to upload the new directory-descriptor and the one changed file -- but if you change a few bytes of a 1GB file, you'd have to upload all the ciphertext for that file again.
- newscracker 8y agoI'm curious what the pricing will be when this is opened up to the public. Some years ago when I compared encrypted online storage, I found Least Authority to be quite expensive. It still seems to be ($25 a month). [1] [1]: https://leastauthority.com/ https://leastauthority.com/
- PlaneSploit 8y agoThis sounds like just inferior Storj.
- fauigerzigerk 8y agoThis is interesting. I currently use Sync.com which works great on my Mac but unfortunately doesn't have a Linux client.
- zencash 8y agoVery interesting, may use this, I'd still layer in a VPN, i've had leaks in the past[1]. [1] https://vpntoolbox.com/disabling-webrtc-browsers/ https://vpntoolbox.com/disabling-webrtc-browsers/