Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

leastauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#61

Post by meejah »

rakoo wrote: post #56
moviuro wrote: post #7

FWIW, I've been using syncthing [0] for some years now [1] and am very pleased. Even though my data is unavailable on the cloud from any untrusted computer (like e.g. my corporate laptop), it's synced on my "fleet". I'm not sure that PrivateStorage actually adds anything to the equation? EDIT> The Tahoe LAFS [2] model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or wh…

You can configure Tahoe-LAFS to store data wherever you want but I guess PrivateStorage will have its own settings and you won't be able to select a nas at home. Just a guess though.

An expert could figure out how to get the PrivateStorage Tahoe client to use other storage servers, but yes in general it is "a managed service" and I don't think using your own storage-servers will be "a supported configuration".

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#62

Post by rakoo »

meejah wrote: post #61
rakoo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can configure Tahoe-LAFS to store data wherever you want but I guess PrivateStorage will have its own settings and you won't be able to select a nas at home. Just a guess though.

An expert could figure out how to get the PrivateStorage Tahoe client to use other storage servers, but yes in general it is "a managed service" and I don't think using your own storage-servers will be "a supported configuration".

At this point you'd just go at the source and use Tahoe directly

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#63

Post by arctux »

scott00 wrote: post #32
moviuro wrote: post #7

FWIW, I've been using syncthing [0] for some years now [1] and am very pleased. Even though my data is unavailable on the cloud from any untrusted computer (like e.g. my corporate laptop), it's synced on my "fleet". I'm not sure that PrivateStorage actually adds anything to the equation? EDIT> The Tahoe LAFS [2] model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or wh…

How much data do you sync? I'm syncing 60 GB with NextCloud and it annoys me frequently: every time I log in it spends 5 minutes scanning my data, pegging at least one core of CPU and using up a lot of my I/O capacity. And of course at a pretty annoying time, since I almost always want to be actually using my machine during the first 5 minutes after logging in. And I'd really like to be syncing more data. Anyway, won…

I'm syncing around 90 GB between my server, laptop, and LineageOS Pixel phone. I use it to sync my documents, music, passwords, and archived pictures. I also use it to sync photos taken by my phone camera as they are taken.

Setup:

* Camera: 1.8 GB, 243 files

* Documents: 10.8 GB, 4604 files

* Music: 61.5 GB, 25077 files

* Passwords: 660 KB, 726 files

* Pictures: 16.5 GB, 6450 files

The passwords are managed by 'pass' [0], which is viewable on my phone using Password Store [1]. Cold-launching Syncthing takes ~10 seconds on my phone, but it does it automatically on boot and thereafter runs in the background. Battery impact seems to be negligible.

[0]: https://www.passwordstore.org/

[1]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.zeapo.pwdstore/ and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeapo.pwds...

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#64

Post by meejah »

moviuro wrote: post #11
zorked wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big thing is that Tahoe LAFS can be run on untrusted computers.

So you share your data on untrusted machines that you bet will live long enough to hold what you want to keep. Sounds risky. Do storage providers have an incentive to provide the service reliably à la filecoin? [0] [0] https://filecoin.io/

In the PrivateStorage case the machines aren't "trusted" but they are all run by the service you're paying for -- so the incentive to keep them running properly is indeed there.

For other kinds of Tahoe deployments, no there's nothing built-in to incentivize storage-server operators. That part is up to whomever is organizing and running the Grid (what Tahoe calls a group of storage-servers). For example, friends could agree to host storage-servers for each other and create redundancy + trust that way.

The difference between Tahoe and things like Storj / FileCoin is that those services intend to be "a single, global service" whereas Tahoe is software that can be deployed in several different ways -- one of which is a professionally managed Grid such as PrivateStorage.

If you are interested in these topics I'd encourage you to join #tahoe-lafs on Freenode or one of the Tahoe development meetings. These are definitely things I've seen discussed but I think Tahoe-LAFS is far more likely to introduce a concept of "federated Grids" rather than "a single global Tahoe service".

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#65

Post by _bxg1 »

meejah wrote: post #60
_bxg1 wrote: post #44

Does anyone know what kind of impact client-side encryption would have on sync speed for potentially-large files (as opposed to simple text messages)?

Tahoe-LAFS does "erasure coding" on the chunks of data. This increases the size of the data (adding redundancy) so that you can recover a file without recovering every single chunk. These parameters are decided client-side. In the smallest possible case (i.e. every chunk required) there is some slight overhead from the zfec and Tahoe headers. If you are using redundancy of any kind, it will inflate the size of the ci…

Hadn't even thought about a difference in size; I was thinking the CPU overhead. If I save a 1GB file, how much processor time will it take to re-encrypt the whole thing so it can be sent off? Or does the chunking apply here too; i.e. only the chunk of the file that's changed has to be re-encrypted?

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#66

Post by meejah »

rakoo wrote: post #62
meejah wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An expert could figure out how to get the PrivateStorage Tahoe client to use other storage servers, but yes in general it is "a managed service" and I don't think using your own storage-servers will be "a supported configuration".

At this point you'd just go at the source and use Tahoe directly

Sure, yes you could do that -- I mean, PrivateStorage is just shipping you a "real actual Tahoe client". The main feature you're getting is the managed storage-servers.

So if you happened to "not completely trust" the availability of those you could also configure one of your own and configure your client(s) to use that and the PrivateStorage servers. That is, hedging against PrivateStorage going away so suddenly you can't retrieve your data.

But, I agree: if you're doing that you're likely able to run your own Tahoe grid on VPSes or similar.

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#67

Post by tchaffee »

lotharrr wrote: post #33
tchaffee wrote: post #29

Should anything truly private be stored in the cloud? I have never seen a solution that doesn't boil down to trusting someone. The claim is that the code is open source. But I don't know how I would verify that that's the actual code they are running on their servers. I also don't understand the payoff. For information that's not truly private (like your music collection) but that could possibly be data mined, then a…

The data is encrypted on your client before it leaves your computer. You're relying upon the servers to hold onto your ciphertext (i.e. availability), but not to keep it secret (confidentiality). And the client can detect changes to the ciphertext, so you aren't relying upon the servers for integrity either. You have to trust the client code, for sure, but that's something that you're at least nominally in a position…

I'm a programmer. And I still don't think I'm in a position to verify if something is cryptographically secure. It's quite possible that a client has been built with an extremely subtle backdoor already in mind. One that crypto experts won't find for years.

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#68

Post by meejah »

_bxg1 wrote: post #65
meejah wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tahoe-LAFS does "erasure coding" on the chunks of data. This increases the size of the data (adding redundancy) so that you can recover a file without recovering every single chunk. These parameters are decided client-side. In the smallest possible case (i.e. every chunk required) there is some slight overhead from the zfec and Tahoe headers. If you are using redundancy of any kind, it will inflate the size of the ci…

Hadn't even thought about a difference in size; I was thinking the CPU overhead. If I save a 1GB file, how much processor time will it take to re-encrypt the whole thing so it can be sent off? Or does the chunking apply here too; i.e. only the chunk of the file that's changed has to be re-encrypted?

I don't know the exact answer to that, but "not much" in comparison to the time to send the bytes over the network. The actual contents are encrypted using AES which often has built-in instructions on modern processors and is thus very fast. The vast majority of the time is uploading time here.

Tahoe does use "convergent encryption" (basically, the key is based on the contents) so that the same file encrypted by the same client results in the same ciphertext (and thus, doesn't need to be re-uploaded).

I believe that only happens at the "capability" (i.e. file) level, though, not each chunk. So, if you had a directory of 10 files each 100MB and changed one, you'd only have to upload the new directory-descriptor and the one changed file -- but if you change a few bytes of a 1GB file, you'd have to upload all the ciphertext for that file again.

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#69

Post by _bxg1 »

meejah wrote: post #68
_bxg1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn't even thought about a difference in size; I was thinking the CPU overhead. If I save a 1GB file, how much processor time will it take to re-encrypt the whole thing so it can be sent off? Or does the chunking apply here too; i.e. only the chunk of the file that's changed has to be re-encrypted?

I don't know the exact answer to that, but "not much" in comparison to the time to send the bytes over the network. The actual contents are encrypted using AES which often has built-in instructions on modern processors and is thus very fast. The vast majority of the time is uploading time here. Tahoe does use "convergent encryption" (basically, the key is based on the contents) so that the same file encrypted by the…

Thanks for the well-informed answers!

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#70

Post by NickHoff »

scott00 wrote: post #32
moviuro wrote: post #7

FWIW, I've been using syncthing [0] for some years now [1] and am very pleased. Even though my data is unavailable on the cloud from any untrusted computer (like e.g. my corporate laptop), it's synced on my "fleet". I'm not sure that PrivateStorage actually adds anything to the equation? EDIT> The Tahoe LAFS [2] model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or wh…

How much data do you sync? I'm syncing 60 GB with NextCloud and it annoys me frequently: every time I log in it spends 5 minutes scanning my data, pegging at least one core of CPU and using up a lot of my I/O capacity. And of course at a pretty annoying time, since I almost always want to be actually using my machine during the first 5 minutes after logging in. And I'd really like to be syncing more data. Anyway, won…

I have about 10 GB in multiple folders synced in various combinations between:

- ec2 instance (light burstable, always on)

- desktop (debian)

- laptop (manjaro)

- desktop (windows)

- phone (one-way sync to get photos off the phone)

- tablet (kindle fire)

It has been great. Solid and trustworthy. It picks up changes made before the service was running, handles deletes and renames just fine, and updates are simple. The web-based UI is good.

I like that calmh and the team are not adding lots of features. There are lots of things they could add to make syncthing "better", but they want to make sure syncthing does one thing well.

One nit - the UI shows the "latest change" for each folder. The common understanding of this phrase would be "the file in that folder that most recently changed" but what syncthing actually shows here is "the most recent change that syncthing made to this folder". That means that if I change a file on the current device and syncthing picks it up and replicates it out to the other devices, that change will not be shown as the "latest change". If some other device changes the file and syncthing replicates that change back to the current device, then it will be shown as the "latest change". This is confusing. "latest change" should just show the file that most recently changed for any reason.

Post reply on HN