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Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

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Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#181

Post by danielsiders »

rdl wrote: post #172
danielsiders wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's powered by the Tent protocol ( https://tent.io ) so by definition, yes. The library is also open for anyone who wants to implement their own alternative, compatible apps, and alternative compatible libraries could be implemented since it's all just specific (documented) types of Tent posts.

Is tent designed for large-scale file storage? I always thought of it as an app.net/twitter alternative.

Tent is a protocol for decentralized event-based communication at scale. File sync is actually a medium-weight application in terms of the load it's designed for.

Of course, just like web servers, the server implementation and hardware it runs on has a lot to do with it. One of our top development priorities is building a very robust, scalable self-hostable server implementation to power apps like file sync and even more demanding applications.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#182

Post by DanWaterworth »

kijin wrote: post #109

Seriously? Wuala is a service run by LaCie. LaCie is owned by Seagate, an American corporation. It doesn't matter where the servers are, because all the important decisions will be made in Cupertino, California. http://www.lacie.com/us/company/news/news.htm?id=10722 Now, client-side encryption is a much more interesting aspect of their service, but is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times long…

wuala isn't just doing client-side encryption, it is also doing reed-solomon coding.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#183

Post by objectivefs »

kijin wrote: post #174
a3_nm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times longer than Dropbox to sync a file between two devices Is this some general FUD about encryption being slow, or an actual measurement? Maybe all client-side encrypted solutions happen to be crappily implemented, but I don't think that client-side encryption would necessarily lead to something noticeably slower.

I have absolutely no intention to spread FUD about client-side encryption, and in fact I don't think Dropbox's speed advantage has anything to do with (lack of) encryption. Encryption shouldn't have any noticeable impact on sync speed, since modern CPUs can encrypt a file a hundred times over in the time it takes to upload/download it. I agree with you and suspect that it has more to do with crappy architecture. Anec…

Client-side encryption can be very fast when done right. For your use case a filesystem stored in the cloud might be a better solution, that way only the data you are using is downloaded to each machine and the writes are done immediately. Give ObjectiveFS[1] a try, the free preview is available for a few more days, and see how fast client-side encryption can be.

[1] https://objectivefs.com

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#184

Post by rarrrrrr »

kijin wrote: post #174
a3_nm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times longer than Dropbox to sync a file between two devices Is this some general FUD about encryption being slow, or an actual measurement? Maybe all client-side encrypted solutions happen to be crappily implemented, but I don't think that client-side encryption would necessarily lead to something noticeably slower.

I have absolutely no intention to spread FUD about client-side encryption, and in fact I don't think Dropbox's speed advantage has anything to do with (lack of) encryption. Encryption shouldn't have any noticeable impact on sync speed, since modern CPUs can encrypt a file a hundred times over in the time it takes to upload/download it. I agree with you and suspect that it has more to do with crappy architecture. Anec…

SpiderOak cofounder here.

It's not really about the encryption directly; it's about the way the database design has to change to support zero knowledge (the server can no longer do the database work.)  Things like garbage collection have to happen client side.  Described in detail here:  https://spideroak.com/blog/20091026143000-why-and-how-spider...

FYI, when SpiderOak first starts running, like any backup software, it has to scan your filesystem to see what may have changed while it was shutdown, and that can take a lot of IO and CPU if you have many folders and/or many small files (hundreds of thousands).  (SpiderOak works with any folders you like, including externa/network drives, not just one folder like Dropbox.)  

In a profile, basically none of this CPU time is spent in the crypto module, just mostly for unserializing the per-folder journal to compare state.  SpiderOak does some optimizations with directory hashing to avoid having to open the journal to scan for specific changes in unchanged folders, but there are some situations where that optimization is defeated (such as if you remount a file system with changed gids, inode IDs, timestamps, etc.)  

Anyway, once it's running, it uses the operating system facilities on Linux/Mac/Windows to notice changes automatically so rescanning the whole backup selection after startup is not usually necessary.

In any case, thanks for your interest in SpiderOak. :)

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#185

Post by mwfunk »

kijin wrote: post #109

Seriously? Wuala is a service run by LaCie. LaCie is owned by Seagate, an American corporation. It doesn't matter where the servers are, because all the important decisions will be made in Cupertino, California. http://www.lacie.com/us/company/news/news.htm?id=10722 Now, client-side encryption is a much more interesting aspect of their service, but is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times long…

"...is it worth the trouble if Wuala's clunky client takes 100 times longer than Dropbox to sync a file between two devices?"

I have no idea what the performance difference is (and clearly , neither do you), but the answer to your question is "yes". For some people, at least. It's a must-have feature for some people, not a nice-to-have-as-long-as-it-doesn't-inconvenience-me-too-much feature. Some people have data that they'd like to keep synced across systems that they simply can't keep in unencrypted form on a third-party server, no matter how much trust they have in the company that owns the service.

Of course, there are a bunch of different ways to keep your data secure and still have it be available to you on different systems, and non-open-sourced cloud storage with client-side encryption is still an imperfect solution, but it is a solution that is perfectly reasonable for many people.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#186

Post by mike-cardwell »

pasbesoin wrote: post #161
a3_nm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Dropbox bundled a keylogger with the Dropbox client, I'm pretty sure it would eventually attract some attention...

Who's to say they can't be convinced to push a one-off update to your account/machine. Perhaps a transitory one, to help cover their tracks? The underlying problem is that you're trusting closed client software from a third-party. Once that is running on your system, arguably it's game over as far as what Dropbox or its like can and can't do to you. (If you trust them, ok. But when documents state that "they're next"…

https://grepular.com/Protecting_Your_GNU_Linux_System_from_D...

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#187

Post by pasbesoin »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #186
pasbesoin wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's to say they can't be convinced to push a one-off update to your account/machine. Perhaps a transitory one, to help cover their tracks? The underlying problem is that you're trusting closed client software from a third-party. Once that is running on your system, arguably it's game over as far as what Dropbox or its like can and can't do to you. (If you trust them, ok. But when documents state that "they're next"…

https://grepular.com/Protecting_Your_GNU_Linux_System_from_D...

Thank you. I will read through this.

Let me take the opportunity to also thank you for writing up your email best practices. I hope to implement them or something similar for myself.

One of the challenges for me in all this is keeping up including with the implementation details. It feels akin to swimming upstream, with the current outpacing me.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#188

Post by pacomerh »

solnyshok wrote: post #39

I used Wuala for couple of years, when it was free and allowed earning a much larger quota by sharing own drive space to host other user's data. I used it to keep around 100GB of my personal data. Used to be good while it lasted. Encrypted, distributed, redundant. Then LaCie bought it and turned it into a Dropbox clone. Now I use AeroFS, also tried TorrentSync. Both a roughly equal. I just felt lazy changing from alr…

It's still free, I don't pay a dime.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#190

Post by simgidacav »

lucian1900 wrote: post #112
simgidacav wrote: post #6

Not to be cynic, but what prevents those guys from putting a backdoor as well? Yeah, sure, Swiss guys are good. Are they? In the end, IMHO, the only software which can be trusted is the FOSS. From this perspective Dropbox is good: the client is open source. Of course nothing is encrypted in there.

Dropbox's client is not open source by any stretch of the imagination.

https://www.dropbox.com/help/247/en

On the first I was like "ops, said bullshit"... but actually it seems like it's GPL.

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