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I'm not sure how they plan to stick to this part "we won’t share your content with others, including law enforcement, for any purpose unless you direct us to".

by sriramk 15y ago

I'm not sure how they plan to stick to this part "we won’t share your content with others, including law enforcement, for any purpose unless you direct us to". If Dropbox gets a sub-poena to hand over some user's content, can they really ask the user first whether they can share it with law enforcement? I was involved with some of this stuff back at MSFT and it isn't something you had a great deal of leeway with.

molecule 15y ago
http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=867#comment-244671740 http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=867#comment-244671740
- sriramk 15y ago
  In that case, what does the text in my comment mean? If law enforcement is asking you for content, they'll always have some legal paperwork to back it up. Those rare exceptions are pretty much the rule when it comes to dealing with LE.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    Not even remotely "always". These days, law enforcement will frequently talk to a service provider before they have a warrant, and the service provider will often cooperate without seeing a warrant. However, the exceptions in Dropbox's ToS and Privacy Policy allow them to do the same under a broad set of circumstances, not just when required to by a warrant/subpoena.
koenigdavidmj 15y ago
At the cost of some user-friendliness they can rework their key management to make it impossible for anyone to decrypt your files unless they have your private key (which you would put in place on each of your computers).
- threepointone 15y ago
  I'd love to know more about this, if you have the time to point me to some place to learn/read/listen. I'm an amateur backend developer(yay node), and I'm trying to figure out how to make it so that even I'm not able to read the contents of a users uploaded file/generated content without a key. Can I use the password as this key? How would I go about this?
  - dawson 15y ago
    I can help you with this having just done it for my own startup. Send me an email and I'll shoot you over our independent security report which explains all.
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    It depends on how user-friendly you want to be. A balanced solution would be to use their password to encrypt a really long key, with which you encrypt their data by using symmetric encryption. This way you can add new computers as long as you know the password, and you only have to re-encrypt the key when the user changes their password. A more secure, but much more cumbersome solution would be to do the same but with private keys on each computer. However, to add a new computer you'd have to have the user transfer their private key from one computer to the other without ever reaching you, so that other computer could decrypt the filesystem encryption key and re-encrypt it adding the new public key.
  - fduran 15y ago
    For text (not for files) you can encrypt on the client side using JS (a fine library: http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ ) before uploading to the server, this is what I do in https://whisperpassword.com/ https://whisperpassword.com/
sunchild 15y ago
Are you going to sue them if they do it anyway? I don't think the case would take you very far, esp. since law enforcement only needs to tell you to direct DB to release the records.

by sriramk 15y ago

molecule 15y ago

http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=867#comment-244671740 http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=867#comment-244671740

sriramk 15y ago
In that case, what does the text in my comment mean? If law enforcement is asking you for content, they'll always have some legal paperwork to back it up. Those rare exceptions are pretty much the rule when it comes to dealing with LE.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  Not even remotely "always". These days, law enforcement will frequently talk to a service provider before they have a warrant, and the service provider will often cooperate without seeing a warrant. However, the exceptions in Dropbox's ToS and Privacy Policy allow them to do the same under a broad set of circumstances, not just when required to by a warrant/subpoena.

koenigdavidmj 15y ago

At the cost of some user-friendliness they can rework their key management to make it impossible for anyone to decrypt your files unless they have your private key (which you would put in place on each of your computers).

threepointone 15y ago
I'd love to know more about this, if you have the time to point me to some place to learn/read/listen. I'm an amateur backend developer(yay node), and I'm trying to figure out how to make it so that even I'm not able to read the contents of a users uploaded file/generated content without a key. Can I use the password as this key? How would I go about this?
- dawson 15y ago
  I can help you with this having just done it for my own startup. Send me an email and I'll shoot you over our independent security report which explains all.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  It depends on how user-friendly you want to be. A balanced solution would be to use their password to encrypt a really long key, with which you encrypt their data by using symmetric encryption. This way you can add new computers as long as you know the password, and you only have to re-encrypt the key when the user changes their password. A more secure, but much more cumbersome solution would be to do the same but with private keys on each computer. However, to add a new computer you'd have to have the user transfer their private key from one computer to the other without ever reaching you, so that other computer could decrypt the filesystem encryption key and re-encrypt it adding the new public key.
- fduran 15y ago
  For text (not for files) you can encrypt on the client side using JS (a fine library: http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ ) before uploading to the server, this is what I do in https://whisperpassword.com/ https://whisperpassword.com/

sunchild 15y ago

Are you going to sue them if they do it anyway? I don't think the case would take you very far, esp. since law enforcement only needs to tell you to direct DB to release the records.