Infinite Hard Drive??? - Bitcasa

RobertKaucher

Have any of you guys seen BitCasa?

It looks like a sort of cloud based file system, but I cannot seem to find any real info on it. Their web page is a little thin on details. I signed up for the beta but I'm not sure if it won't be totally lame.

Devilsbane

It sounds familar. Did you see Bitcasa moves your hard drive to the cloud | Rafe's Radar - CNET News

RobertKaucher

Thanks for that! I can't give you rep, though...

Sadly I am still not convinced that the service will not be lame. oh, well. Free beta - I guess I will see.

Everyone

I see what you did there... :P

Agree with your thoughts on the website, not enough details. Lots of marketing hype targeted at an average home user. I have to know technical details on this sort of thing before deciding to use it.

tiersten

I'm suspicious of their security. Their website doesn't make the claim but their CEO has said that they do deduplication between you and others. This is incompatible with the other claims that they do secure client side encryption and have no clue what your files or folders even are.

Being able to dedupe whilst encrypting the files is possible but there are security implications from doing it. I can fairly confidently say that they're not going to be daft enough to just use a single key for everybody but are more likely doing the following:

1. Generate a key based on the file contents itself and encrypt the file with this key.
2. Encrypt the previous key with your own key.
3. Send the encrypted file and the key generated from step 2 to the Bitcasa servers.

If somebody else comes along and uploads that file again then the Bitcasa servers will determine that its the same file because the encrypted file should be the same for everybody as the key was based on file contents.

The issue is that Bitcasa can work out what your files are. If the MPAA or RIAA suddenly start calling with a court order and go hey! has anybody stored a copy of PreReleaseMovie2012.divx on your server? The file looks like this <insert encrypted file here> then it Bitcasa can just go yup! UserA, UserB and UserC all have that file.

There are implementation details regarding the access you data from any device anywhere and the sharing between users as well. Depending on how that is implemented may affect security greatly and whether it is technically possible for Bitcasa to recover your data.

RobertKaucher

Everyone wrote: »

I see what you did there... :P

Agree with your thoughts on the website, not enough details. Lots of marketing hype targeted at an average home user. I have to know technical details on this sort of thing before deciding to use it.

Lol. That actually wasn't intentional. I'm not too concerned about getting a lame service for life. It wasn't until I saw your message I realized I posted that link!