Remove the statement about Send's official instance

Site Development
1

Send’s official instance will be terminated by May 24.

Could Privacy Guides plan on hosting an instance?

3 Likes
2

This seems like an easy of enough change. All in favor for it personally

1 Like
3

Costs are getting too high to keep hosting this service.

I wonder what their costs actually are?

4

Maybe a link to the official list of public instances instead?

Edit: scratch this idea. There dev notes that there is no way to verify the instances for security/privacy. The best option is for another trusted group to fill the void or of course self hosting.

5

I think ultimately all of these instances will fall to the original reason Firefox Send was discontinued:

Unfortunately, some abusive users were beginning to use Send to ship malware and conduct spear phishing attacks. This summer we took Firefox Send offline to address this challenge.

2 Likes
6
7

This is why we cannot have nice things.

8

We need to look into whether using the ffsend CLI tool eliminates the need to trust the instance, because if that tool performs the encryption before upload the risk is very reduced.

3 Likes
9

ffsend uses client side encryption, to ensure your files are securely encrypted before they are uploaded to the remote host. This makes it impossible for third parties to decrypt your file without having the secret (encryption key). The file and its metadata are encrypted using 128-bit AES-GCM , and a HMAC SHA-256 signing key is used for request authentication. This is consistent with the encryption documentation provided by the Send service, ffsend is a tool for.

Taken from here.

1 Like
10

But anyone with the url can decrypt the file which would mean the server stores the private key. This wouldn’t be e2ee and would still require trust of the server. As far as the “optional” password it sounds like this happens outside of the encryption. Does it wrap it in another layer of encryption or just an another wall?

11

Sorry for the late reply. If one only uses the command line ffsend tool without visiting the hosted instance, the instance never gets the encryption secret, which is stored behind the hash of the URL that can be shared. Using the hosted instance with the website instead of the ffsend command line tool is prone to interception of the encryption secret if the instance has modified the website’s source to steal it. Using only the ffsend command line tool is safe regardless of the instance used because even a malicious instance never gets the encryption key.

TL;DR: ffsend command line tool is safe regardless if instance is malicious.

Source

12

This is excellent news. Thanks for explaining.

13

The official instance now shows a termination date of June 7th.

Following the information provided by @any1, I think we can do more than just remove the statement about Send’s official instance: