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Dropbox acquires Boxcryptor. What will happen to all those files that have been encrypted?
Hi
As most will know, dropbox has purchased boxcryptor. At this point my question is, what will happen to all those files that have been encrypted with boxcryptor ? Should they all be decrypted an...
riccardo1981 wrote:
At this point my question is, what will happen to all those files that have been encrypted with boxcryptor ?
Since this is such a new development, such answers are likely not available yet, beyond what has been stated by the Boxcryptor founders (emphasis mine).
What does this mean for our users and customers?
First of all: All our existing users and customers will remain with the German Secomba GmbH with the same shareholders as during the past 10 years. No contracts, customer data or keys will migrate to Dropbox, all data will remain in our German data centers.
While weâve sold several key technology assets to Dropbox, we will continue to service our existing users and customers pursuant to the terms of their existing contracts. However, as of today, we will not allow the creation of new accounts or purchases of any new licenses.
If youâre an existing customer, you can keep using Boxcryptor as you do today, and weâll be in touch with more details as we join forces with Dropbox. If youâre new here and would like to stay up to date on Dropboxâs progress, join the Dropbox mailing list.
You will also find the most important FAQs regarding the next steps below.
As detailed above, I was able to get Boxcryptor working on an offline Mac in Local Account mode. I can even sign out, then sign in while still offline, so the Boxcryptor mothership does not have to be available. Thanks to Martin R.19 for his advice.
Now, I have a second Mac that I also use with Boxcryptor-encrypted files. I converted to Local Account mode on that Mac as well, with both computers using the same key file.
The good news is that I can have Dropbox sync the files, just as always, and still use Boxcryptor on both, now in Local Account mode. Everything works exactly as before, so it's as if Boxcryptor is staying around indefinitely. As mentioned by others above, this will work until it doesn't, so this is not a great solution for the long term. Realizing this, though, pending full integration of Boxcryptor into Dropbox, at least I don't have to completely redo my entire security workflow immediately.
Hi all. Glad to hear people are having success testing boxcryptor install on a fresh system to ensure we can access our files after March even when the main BC site goes down. However, we still have two looming problems by my reckoning. The first was mentioned previously; Apple updates OSX in a way that is incompatible with the client, and we know the client is EOL. But I would strongly encourage everyone to consider this second point. Did you actually decrypt all your files away from BC? Did you actually run a recursive search over the filesystem looking for any filenames in kanji? I always thought that was a clever trick BC used for filename encryption by leveraging the namespace of Unicode or UTF-32 or whatever it is and using printable Japanese characters that encoded English characters underneath. But now, is everyone sure you decrypted everything? How did you search for any remaining encrypted files? The official recommendation was simply to copy every file in BC to an unencrypted volume and sure that would work. But I didn't have enough storage around to do that, so I tried to go directory by directory hunting for encrypted stragglers. How does one even write a recursive grep for the possible character set BC uses? Has anyone else solved this problem? I've posted this concern before but no one seems to know.
I decrypted everything I had in both Dropbox and other locations. It was a painful process. Alot of errors along the way, leaving you with half completed folders. Most efficient way for me personally was to decrypt one folder at a time, even down into subfolders for very large folders. Took a few days to do.
apfundDropbox Product Manager
Hi,
Since all encrypted Boxcryptor files end with.bc, you can simply do a grep filtering by that file extension:cd <THE FOLDER YOU WANT TO START YOUR SEARCH FROM> grep -r -i --include='*.bc' \.
Let me know if there are any questions!
- apdund thatâs awesome! Exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks.
And, just to close the loop on this, I was able to use that grep and it surfaced about half a dozen directories in dark corners of my Dropbox volume that were still encrypted with Boxcryptor. Knowing I verifiably decrypted everything 100% gives me a lot more peace of mind. I am finally ready for BC to (sadly) go away.
