On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 01:30:35PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > So, as has been discussed, I envision people having small cheap > machines at home that act as their "cloud", and the system prompting > them to pick a friend to share encrypted backups with.
The Least-Authority Filesystem is designed for this use case (among a small number of other use cases). > Inevitably this means that said backups are going to either be > protected by a fairly weak password or that the user is going to have > to print the key out and put it in their desk drawer and risk having > it lost or stolen or destroyed in a fire. In LAFS, the keys are strong, computer-generated keys, so you have to print them out or write them down. Printing them in triplicate and storing them in separate locations seems like a good trade-off of the risk of theft vs. the risk of loss, for the reasons you give: > I think I can live with either problem. Right now, most people > have very little protection at all. I think making the perfect the > enemy of the good is a mistake. If doing bad things to me requires > breaking in to my individual home, that's fine. If it is merely much > less likely that I lose my data rather than certain that I have no > backup at all, that's fine. > > BTW, automation *does* do a good job of making such things invisible. > I haven't lost any real data since I started using Time Machine from > Apple, and I have non-technical friends who use it and are totally > happy with the results. I wish there was an automated thing in Time > Machine to let me trade backups with an offsite friend as well. The Least-Authority Filesystem comes with a nice backup tool ("tahoe backup"), but it does not come with a nice GUI for your non-technical friends. Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography