this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Why does dropbox have the ability to see your files at all? That seems like a pretty bad security flaw in the first place.
There are drawbacks to end-to-end encryption (E2EE). I'm not aware of any E2EE cloud storage systems that have the features Dropbox provides. I would LOVE to know of any that...
Support at least the big 5 platforms (Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux).
Have a functional web interface.
Support sharing and collaboration.
Have a search feature
Sync to the local filesystem on a folder-by-folder or even file-by-file basis
Integrate with other tools (e.g. android file picker)
It's not easy to do all that with E2EE, like a functional web interface, search, and integration.
ProtonMail's search, for example, is limited to subject and metadata, and that's specifically because they DON'T use E2EE for that.
I'm willing to compromise some of this for the sake of E2EE, but I'm not at all surprised that feature-first services are more popular than privacy-first services.
1: easy to port E2EE, it's just math
2: browsers and E2EE is hard, you need an extension to implement it securely so the password can't be made accessible directly to the server (you need it to remain secret even from the hosting company) or else you're dealing with MITM risk
3: easy by sharing encryption keys using E2EE messaging protocols on top
4: encrypted search is a thing, but such indexes does tend to have some limitations
5: still easy
6: still easy, Android specifically have APIs to let apps register themselves to the file picker so they can transparently encrypt and decrypt files. But yes on other systems where 3rd party apps can't offer such integration then it's hard
I've seen one called Skiff that's trying to do most of these things
https://skiff.com/pages https://skiff.com/drive