FileRock

FileRock was a secure online file storage, file synchronization, and backup service originally developed and run by Heyware S.r.l.

Filerock was discontinued on 20th November 2013.

The service stored files in data centres that were provided by Seeweb S.r.l. in Italy.

History

In July 2011, Heyware S.r.l. has been founded with the mission to bring to the market the results of research developed at Roma Tre University AbOUT verification of integrity of large, dynamically changing, data sets. The FileRock project has been started in September 2011 with the intent to create a cloud-based file storage service whose security is totally handled client-side. The first private beta release of FileRock was released in October 2012. In December 2012, the client source code was released open source under GPL license. On May 3, 2013, the first production release of the service was released.

Features

• Automatic file synchronization of a folder across multiple devices.
• File storage with client-side encryption (just the user can see the content of the file) or in plaintext.
• Data integrity check of the results of all operations performed with the server.
• Access by a web interface (just for plaintext files)
• Sharing from the web of plaintext files through access URLs.

Security

The distinguishing security feature of FileRock is the integrity check of all the responses of the server. A hash of the whole data set is kept by the client and updated whenever the user changes a file. The correctness of the results of all operations performed with the server is checked by matching an integrity proof provided by the server against such a hash. The efficiency of this process is obtained by means of authenticated data structures that are an evolution of hash trees. This form of integrity check can detect any kind of damage of the dataset with respect to the version expected by the client, comprising deletion of files, presence of unexpected files, and restore of old backups.

Besides the integrity checks, the FileRock service has the following security features:

• The user's password is not known by FileRock since both desktop client and web client hash the password before sending it to FileRock.
• Files are encrypted by AES 128. The file encryption key is shared by all clients using FileRock servers as a means of communication. To do this, the encryption key is itself encrypted by a hash of the password that is different from the one used for authentication and not known to FileRock.
• SSL/TLS communication with the server.
• The client source code is open source.

Reviews

• 2012-12-27: FileRock goes open-source
• 2013-01-24: presento FileRock, il Dropbox italiano opensource
• 2013-02-04: Il Dropbox italiano FileRock lancia la beta: 3GB di spazio cloud per i tester
• 2013-04-03: Sauvegarde cryptée et synchronisée en ligne
• 2013-04-04: FILEROCK – BEZPIECZNE SKŁADOWANIE PLIKÓW W CHMURZE? SPRAWDŹMY TO WSPÓLNIE, MAMY ZAPROSZENIA
• 2013-04-17: FileRock : un Dropbox open-source et chiffré
• 2013-05-06: « Dropbox chiffré » FileRock annonce ses formules payantes
• 2013-05-06: FileRock: Disque Dur Virtuel

See also

• Comparison of file synchronization software
• Comparison of online backup services