Venture:
1. We did apply to YC a few months ago, but was rejected in the interviews because they felt that the total addressable market was low. We don't know if other VCs will feel differently and we haven't applied anywhere else since. Perhaps paid subscriptions is in a way public funding? :)
2. The rate at which photos are being taken (a trillion a year), we believe that the market is large enough for multiple players. Also none of the existing solutions provide a user experience that we are happy with, so we would like to keep building until we have something that works for us (at least). Also it helps that we are not very motivated by money. As long as we get to build useful things while being able to sustain our lifestyles, we will be content.
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App:
1. We have been advised by our lawyers to provide no such guarantees. All I can say is that we follow the best engineering practices to make sure that possibility of a data loss/corruption is minimal. And in the unfortunate case that it does happen, we have strategies in place to minimize the damage by applying rollbacks and triggering re-syncs from clients. We will be transparent about any such event.
2. Our infrastructure is agnostic to the data type. Once we have reasonably polished the photos product, we would like to venture into other spaces where E2EE storage + sync is useful.
3. We use BackBlaze as our hot-storage and Scaleway as our cold storage.
4. All files are versioned. File names are not a primary key.
5. Due to the nature of our encryption protocols, we cannot actively look out for illegal content, but we will take down content that violates our ToS[1] when it is brought to our attention.
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Cryptography
1. The key recovery flow was hand rolled and peer reviewed, since we could not find existing implementations that solved for our use cases. We wanted the recoveryKey to be something that can be shared and rotated if necessary. We have reasoned from first principles and have relied on libsodium for executing the actual cryptographic operations. If you have specific concerns with this, please write to security@ente.io, we would love to engage in a conversation.
Wrapped keys are sent to clients only after verifying a user's email address and 2FA (if configured). This is similar to what most other encrypted storage providers do.
2. The extra layer of authentication was added to serve as an implicit second factor. This ensures that even if your email is compromised, an attacker cannot gain access to an auth-token and trigger API calls that could corrupt your data. Both your email and password have to be compromised for them to authenticate against our servers.
3. If by your password being compromised you mean that all of your encryption keys have been compromised, you will have to re-encrypt and re-upload all of your data. It is difficult to rotate a file key without actually re-encrypting the file.
4. These are seasoned engineers who understand and have used high level crypto libraries to build secure infrastructure at a few unicorns.
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ToS:
1. We keep it around just to help users recover their data in case they were attacked.
2. I believe that we should be able to offer a takeout for the data that was not in violation of our ToS, but I would like to speak to our lawyers before confirming this. :)