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Tombdropbox
Or: How to use Dropbox and Tomb to securely store data in the cloud
it is a very easy and interesting method, but have some limitations. Some are tomb's fault, some are dropbox's fault
- you can NOT open a tomb from two different places at the same time (this will do bad things, as there is currently no lock)
- syncing changes to dropbox is veery slow because dropbox sucks and doesn't handle deltas. If you are using similar programs, that handles deltas (sshfs, rsync, sparkleshare) this limitation is going to disappear.
The cloud is potentially a useful thing.
If you want to use it to share work stuff (ovbiously not confidentials ones) is not a problem the fact that your data are stored in remote servers that you can't effectively trust.
But if you need to store personal data and you care about your privacy you can't profits of cloud's benefits without sacrifice privacy.
In this document we will not talk about security that is a different problem but we'll talk about privacy empowerment using clouds services.
Most specifically we'll talk about Dropbox, an increasingly diffused cloud social storage service and Tomb,a simple to use, FLOSS, open minded, tool to encrypt data for desktop usage, with LUKS support.
First of all we suppose you have a Dropbox account.
If you do not have Tomb installed on your linux box see theese instructions: https://github.com/dyne/Tomb/wiki/Howto-install
Now you are ready to create your tomb to store safely your personal data in a unsecure cloud service.
Open a terminal and launch this command to create a tomb of X MB:
tomb create -s X <tomb-name>It is recommended to not create the tomb inside one of the Dropbox directories because Tomb create contextually the encryption key that must be in a separated place to keep security.
Put your tomb encryption key in a secure place :
mv <tomb-name>.tomb.key /secure/place/and move the tomb file inside a Dropbox shared directory:
mv <tomb-name>.tomb /dropbox/shared/directory/Now everything must be ready to securely store your data inside the cloud whitout sacrifice your privacy.
When you need access the tomb just launch this command:
tomb -k /secure/place/<tomb-name>.tomb.key open /dropbox/shared/directory/<tomb-name>.tombyour tomb will be open and accessible inside the media directory like so:
/media/<tomb-name>.tomb/Enjoy secure cloud!