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Risks of Using Dropbox for Secure Transfer

In terms of secure file transfer, Dropbox security hasn’t suffered many hacks, but the biggest ones were notably damaging to the company, resulting in both lost email addresses and 68 million leaked passwords. A few years back, critics including Edward Snowden famously called Dropbox “ hostile to privacy,” which Dropbox didn’t refute – instead, Dropbox itself admitted that it could offer better encryption, and argued that users knew they were sacrificing some security for convenience and performance.Īs a cloud-based service, Dropbox could offer better encryption some other cloud-based file sharing software products use zero-knowledge encryption, meaning that no one – including the online service – besides you holds the keys to your data. But Dropbox does come under fire despite that. It’s not uncommon that technology sacrifices some security for performance, so Dropbox doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb here (for reference, even AES balances security and performance, which is why its key sizes only go up to 256 bits and limits how much it scrambles data). So, Dropbox keeps your encryption key on hand – which keeps processes moving quickly but it also means that Dropbox holds the key to your data and could look at your files at any time. But for that to happen data needs to move freely without being unduly slow (due to pesky things like decryption). Part of the appeal of Dropbox is that it makes interacting with other people and apps quick and simple.