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Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

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11–20 of 158 posts

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#11
This is probably an unfortunate combination of a broad watch for file changes, code that opens changed files to determine whether to proceed (hacks for hardlinks/junction points? collecting more information before bubbling the event up to higher layers?), and built-in analytics.

I'd be shocked if it's actually uploading a comparably sized payload.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#13
post #4

"collect it all" But I wonder why we don't have application isolation as a basic design principle. Imagine an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data. Would that work?

This would completely defeat the point of Dropbox, then; If your Word document is in your Word folder, how does it get to another computer? Do you give the app developer, Microsoft, exclusive right to 'sync' your files elsewhere?

Sandboxing is a good idea. An old idea, actually; chroot was added to unix in 1979. But shared filesystems evolved and are the norm, and even if many apps could be sandboxed, Dropbox exists outside the sandbox for a reason.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#14
Process Monitor[1] will show you every filesystem call Dropbox is making. (Like strace.) That should confirm or refute this article's claims.

(You could also just collect an ETW trace and analyze it in xperf (err, WPA, of course) yourself.)

[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896645.aspx

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#15
"Access" is a bit vague. It's one thing if their 'fstat' is leaking, it's another thing if they are actually reading all the bytes of those files.

Another piece of evidence I'd like to see is a mitmproxy checking out what's under that TLS session. Improper local reads are one thing, it's another thing entirely if they are communicating back file names, hashes and/or the file data actual.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#16
post #8

If taken at face value, this implies that Dropbox is spending their own bandwidth and storage space for data that's potentially much bigger than your actual shared folder, without charging you for it. What's actually going on here? What sort of false positives might we expect from such a program?

The article draws a pretty solid argument, if you wanted to confirm results yourself I'd suggest creating a windows vm, installing dropbox, and getting a packet capture of the traffic leaving when you drop a .docx file in the C:// directory.

It's not a stretch of the imagination that dropbox could still be making a profit spending bandwidth and storage space this way. I can think of a government agency or two that would re-imburse the costs.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#17
In a while, this will be disregarded as a bug, might be fixed and maybe Dropbox will even state that they apology and will be deleting all mistakenly uploaded files from their server(s).

But you don't know. The lesson to be learned here is that proprietary software cannot be trusted.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#18
As you see below, Dropbox says that "only checked folders will sync to this computer"

Very interesting wording. I don't want to play conspiracy theory, but it only says what will sync to the computer. It doesn't say anything about what will sync (or upload) to the cloud.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#20
post #4

"collect it all" But I wonder why we don't have application isolation as a basic design principle. Imagine an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data. Would that work?

Imagin an OS where applications/serices each get their own mini-filesystem, without ability to access each other's data. OS X does this for sandboxed apps: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securi... All apps from the App Store are sandboxed.

What I meant is the app/service isolation on the OS level. It should not apply just to a subset of apps, but to each and every process that runs on a device.
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