3 ms·

"As I said in the post, if the company can grant access to me - they can grant access to themselves, or a malicious insider, or my twin sister." Well, presumab

by rsync 4y ago

"As I said in the post, if the company can grant access to me - they can grant access to themselves, or a malicious insider, or my twin sister." Well, presumably the access is to (seemingly) random, gibberish data that you have stored with (borg, restic, etc.). So you'll need to remember a last-ditch passphrase to your own encryption if you're using us for your backstop. We encourage all of our customers to encrypt their data here - regardless of their use-case - and we don't hold those keys. I can't overstate to you just how suspicious and spidey-sense-tingling we get when someone says they are locked out and can we help them get back in. We get very adversarial and we have a LOT of tests we can apply to their claims. The reason other firms don't do this isn't because it's not workable - but because it is time consuming and "not scalable".

nicoburns 4y ago
If you’re able to remember a password, then why would you need to call support?
- rsync 4y ago
  We're talking about two different passwords - the password to your rsync.net account and the passphrase to (duplicity/borg/restic/etc.) that you used to create your failsafe backup here. If you use an SSH key with a passphrase, etc., to access rsync.net that could, indeed, be an authentication that you lose because your phones and laptops and yubikeys burn in a fire. But if you can authenticate to a human being, which you can here (after a lot of probing and testing), then the only thing you need to remember is your borg passphrase. Or duplicity. Or gpg pipelined through tar ... or whatever.
  - mst 4y ago
    Also, for a bunch of cases, you can use something akin to a multi-step ceasar cipher. Yes, the obvious case of e.g. rot13 isn't exactly helpful security wise, but if you select e.g. 4, 22, 18 as the rotation order now you only need to be able to memorise -that- to get your passphrase back from an otherwise unmarked file lying around in the same (or other) storage. Obviously, think hard about your threat model for that one, but if (as I keep procrastinating) I ever put backups of such stuff on something like rsync.net I'd give something akin to that approach serious consideration as being an acceptable trade-off overall.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Right, but alternatively you could register an account with a password manager, use a (long) pass phrase as the password for that, and store all your other credentials in the password manager. That way you have full access with only a single pass phrase needing to be remembered, and customer support not required…

by rsync 4y ago

nicoburns 4y ago

If you’re able to remember a password, then why would you need to call support?

rsync 4y ago
We're talking about two different passwords - the password to your rsync.net account and the passphrase to (duplicity/borg/restic/etc.) that you used to create your failsafe backup here. If you use an SSH key with a passphrase, etc., to access rsync.net that could, indeed, be an authentication that you lose because your phones and laptops and yubikeys burn in a fire. But if you can authenticate to a human being, which you can here (after a lot of probing and testing), then the only thing you need to remember is your borg passphrase. Or duplicity. Or gpg pipelined through tar ... or whatever.
- mst 4y ago
  Also, for a bunch of cases, you can use something akin to a multi-step ceasar cipher. Yes, the obvious case of e.g. rot13 isn't exactly helpful security wise, but if you select e.g. 4, 22, 18 as the rotation order now you only need to be able to memorise -that- to get your passphrase back from an otherwise unmarked file lying around in the same (or other) storage. Obviously, think hard about your threat model for that one, but if (as I keep procrastinating) I ever put backups of such stuff on something like rsync.net I'd give something akin to that approach serious consideration as being an acceptable trade-off overall.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Right, but alternatively you could register an account with a password manager, use a (long) pass phrase as the password for that, and store all your other credentials in the password manager. That way you have full access with only a single pass phrase needing to be remembered, and customer support not required…