This is a plus to distributing your own app...you can just bundle the public key(s) for your servers with the app Yes, this is one of my standard recommendatio

This is a plus to distributing your own app...you can just bundle the public key(s) for your servers with the app Yes, this is one of my standard recommendations: If you can, distribute your own damn keys. in Tarsnap's case, an SSL leak wouldn't be terrible because everything's encrypted before even going over the wire Correct, and requests are authenticated using signatures, so even if Tarsnap was using SSL, there would be no tokens disclosed which could be stolen. Breaking Tarsnap's client-server encryption/authentication would allow an attacker to identify the names of blocks of data, though -- so he could see e.g., that someone is deleting today the data which was uploaded yesterday.