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Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

landrop.app

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Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#61

Post by yvbbrjdr »

GordonS wrote: post #31
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App seems to be using this: https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/secret-key_cryptography/aea... I have little experience with cryptography, and have no idea whether it is a good choice or not. If it is, how would you convince regular people that the state of the art “something something sodium chachacha” crypto algorithm in the app is the best for them? It might be better not to mention the name. Some stats would be nice…

You could have "state-of-the-art cryptography algorithm" as a link to a page with more details. Or just put the name of the algorithm in brackets afterwards, e.g. "state-of-the-art cryptography algorithm (ChaCha blah AES blah)".

I see. Should've been more concrete about this.

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#62

Post by Shish2k »

smir wrote: post #34

looks polished, how this is different from Syncthing? a true question, not an argument.

Syncthing requires setup on both ends, and then automatically keeps two complete folders in sync across a network (local or internet), conceptually similar to a network file system.

This only requires having the app installed on both ends, and then manually send & receive individual files on-demand (over the local network). It’s more on the level of peer-to-peer instant-messaging.

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#63

Post by yvbbrjdr »

eps wrote: post #22
fulafel wrote: post #12

Glancing at your crypto implementation[1], it seems to contain newbie mistakes - eg no public key crypto involved in your public keys, usage of low level raw crypto algorithm primitives from libsodium without session, replay etc related security concerns, no signs of design requiremnts re what security guarantees it's trying to provide, no PK key management, etc. You're also hand rolling wire protocol code in C++, ma…

If you feel like throwing "newbie" accusations around, it'd be prudent to back your list of grievances up with more than a single link to crypto.cpp. Chances are you misread the code, didn't grok what the op was doing, etc. As it stands your comment reads like a common variety abrasive and dismissive gatekeeping... rant, basically, which is unfortunately so popular in crypto circles. Edit - the project does dearly ne…

Will draft a crypto spec if I have time :)

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#64

Post by yvbbrjdr »

opheliate wrote: post #52
fulafel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's about 2 screefuls of very simple code. Eg for the PK part, if you ctrl-f for publicKey and remotePublicKey, you see there are no usages that could plausibly be doing public key crypto or PK key generation based on crypto 101 from school. Not sure how to respond about gatekeeping. What do you think would be a good way to write a comment pointing out these kinds of security problems? Or do you think it's unf…

I’m not sure what you mean by there being no public key cryptography here. In the Crypto constructor, a random secret key is generated, and then the generator for Curve25519 is scalar multiplied on the elliptic curve by this secret key to generate a public key. That’s the standard process for X25519 key generation, and it’s what Libsodium does to generate a secret key/public key pair [1]. To establish a shared secret…

The reason I "rolled my own" key exchange is that I'd want to use the IETF variant of Chacha20-Poly1305 in my protocol and there doesn't seem to be helper functions for key exchange for this algo.

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#65

Post by yvbbrjdr »

chetangoti wrote: post #3

This looks good. There is similar tool which web based and opensource Snapdrop[0]( https://snapdrop.net/ ) which works on the same network. [0] https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop

Yeah I've also done my research and found a lot of similar stuff. The problem with this particular one is it requires Internet* to work. I don't feel good about WebRTC and having to share my public IP address for such a task.

Also, it requires you to open a webpage every time you use it. I'd really like the user experience of AirDrop that you need to do nothing to receive files. So I made LANDrop a daemon-like stuff.

* It has a mode that you can save the page offline, but that doesn't work with iOS.

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#66

Post by yvbbrjdr »

jlanger wrote: post #10

I agree completely with @tjohns first point, if you're calling out UX as a top point then you really should have screenshots. You should have screenshots anyway.. I dislike having to download something just to see what it looks like. Not having screenshots just makes the barrier to entry higher. Second point, you really need to make sure spelling is correct (i.e. "celluar" should be "cellular"), that degrades the per…

Sry about the spelling. Will fix it soon!

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#67

Post by yvbbrjdr »

AM1010101 wrote: post #48

Just tested out with my iPhone to Ubuntu 20.04. Works nicely with photos. Tried to sending some videos (iPhone to Linux) and some of them fail. A short 30 second video worked fine but longer 4 and 8 minute ones failed. Those longer videos may have also been stored on iCloud and not locally. Within the iOS app it doesn’t “select” the longer video files to be able to send them. Hope this helps. Nice tool and I can see…

Thx for your report! Yeah it's a known issue on iOS that it takes a long time to process videos.. especially long ones..

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#68

Post by yvbbrjdr »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #43

There're a few such tools, e.g. TrebleShot and NitroShare. Does this improve something over the current solutions or is an alternative? Also Snapdrop and ShareDrop are two web apps offering similar functionality. Good choices in case someone doesn't want to install anything.

I've done my research and also found a lot of similar stuff. They are all not as convenient as AirDrop, so I wanted to make a thing that's close enough.

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#69

Post by yvbbrjdr »

12ian34 wrote: post #35

Great effort here. Agree with others re UX and the unsigned APK. I currently use Syncthing to fulfil my LAN file transfer needs. It's not quite the same but it does have a bunch of other use cases which I like, plus it's well-known, well-supported, also open, and I trust it.

APK will be signed soon! I just didn't have the bandwidth to generate a keypair :).

Re: Show HN: LANDrop – A cross-platform AirDrop-like file transfer tool

#70

Post by yvbbrjdr »

n3storm wrote: post #5

Is there a directive, good practice, neuroscience advantage I am not aware of in not publishing screenshots or screencapture of sofware?

Just lazy and not having the time to do this yet. Making a screenshot work with the webpage takes a lot of effort.
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