Dropbox acquires cloud encryption service Boxcryptor
The founders of the cloud encryption service BoxCryptor announced this week that Dropbox has acquired the company's intellectual product. According to the announcement on the official Boxcryptor blog, Dropbox acquired IP technology from Boxcryptor, but not customer data.
Dropbox plans to use the technology to bring zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption to its products. Boxcryptor will work on embedding its encryption technology into Dropbox products.
Existing Boxcryptor customers will continue to be serviced by the company for the duration of their license and from German data centers. No customer data is transferred to Dropbox servers according to the announcement.
Boxcryptor plans to service existing customers "through the duration of their contracts". The service was offered to individuals, business and Enterprise customers. Individuals could use a limited free version of Boxcryptor or could sign-up for business or personal plans. The maximum subscription period appears to have been 3-years for individuals who signed-up for a paid plan.
Team licenses were also provided as 1-year and 3-year licenses. Enterprise customers may have been able to negotiate different support periods. It appears that paying customers will be able to continue using the service for up to 3 years. No word on how free users are affected.
All existing users and customers will receive emails with information soon. Boxcryptor does not accept new account creations or license purchases anymore.
What is happening after the end of support? This is anyone's guess at the time, as Boxcryptor has not revealed the information yet. It looks as if customers won't be able to extend their licenses. If true, customers would have to find a different service to encrypt data in the cloud.
A migration offer to Dropbox may be one of the options for existing Boxcryptor customers.
Boxcryptor Alternative
Boxcryptor users may want to check out Cryptomator instead, which offers a similar product. Cryptomator is an open source solution that is also available for teams. The solution for teams is called Cryptomator Hub.
Now You: do you use cloud services?
>Inb4 you must pay extra to be allowed to use e2e-encryption
>inb4 you must use it through their client with no control over your own keys
They will find a way to water it down until it is indigestible. Remember the cloud is just someone else’s playground and you are paying for their rules being forced onto you.
I am using Dropbox for common stuff, none personnel , none private. Lately I was testing to improve security with Cryptomator and got it working. it asks however a couple of extra efforts so I limit its use for sensitive documents only.
Next to this I am using more the Meta cloud service that is zero knowledge, and E2EE from itself.
My suspicion is that Dropbox isn’t doing this for us, it’s for their own financial benefit. BC was a direct threat to it’s revenue stream because Dropbox was able to charge for the same benefit that BC provided. They’ve just taken out a revenue threat and are not doing this out of the goodness of their data-prying little hearts …
Dropbox is too expensive. I can’t believe they are still alive.
If Dropbox adds E2EE without compromising their features (e.g. integration with MS Office desktop, mobile and web apps, delta/block-level sync, LAN sync, API integration in pretty much any app that allows saving to the cloud, …) then it could be the best product on the market. It’s big name alone would put it above Mega and Tresorit and other E2EE clouds.