Amazon S3 extension for Firefox

[rustleg]

As you know I'd like to find a cloud backup which works with KNOS. Currently I run JungleDisk in Linux. It also has Windows and Mac clients but not BSD. I use Amazon S3 as my cloud storage provider, JungleDisk is just the interface. I have recently come across an extension for Firefox "S3 Firefox Organiser (S3Fox)".

I found this through the latest of Steve Gibson's "Security Now" podcasts which I read via a transcript which is made available a few days later. Here's the link:
www.grc.com/sn/sn-349.htm
Search for "S3 Explorer" to find the part where he mentions it.

He appears to use it although it's only at version 0.6. I regard him in the same camp as you as as a security guru (not sure if you agree but I have a lot of respect for him and what I have learned from him and his newsgroup - actually how I found out about KNOS). So if he is using it then maybe it is safe to use.

I wonder if you would let me know if this is usable within KNOS and also if you have any thoughts on insecurities. I haven't actually used it yet to try to connect to my backups although they are encrypted as you need to put in the Amazon secret codes to access them and I don't know how safe that is. How do I know they aren't being transmitted across the internet?

If I used it within KNOS I'd set up a separate bucket for my KNOS data and have to find a way to encrypt the files before backing up.

I'll also post a question on Steve's newsgroup to see if anyone can shed further light on this extension.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Steve and Nancy and I go back *ages* together ... we're old friends. We used to LIVE on his forum back in the old days! If "Uncle Steve" doesn't get back to you, write him directly and tell him "Kevin and Nancy from NSClean and BOClean" (that's us!) sent ya and I'm sure he'll get back to you on it.

I know the BSD kids are working on Amazon S3 code for BSD itself, but the project is only partially completed at this time. We haven't pulled in any of it ourselves since we require code for KNOS to be fully cooked. But it's almost there.

That said, it looks like it's just upload, download and manage so it probably will work as intended. Doesn't seem to have any crypto management in that so you'll probably have to handle that separately. Their site is here with more details:

www.s3fox.net/

I don't see why it wouldn't work in the Firefox shipped with KNOS, but I note that their last update was over a year ago in February of 2011. The reviews show 3 of 5 stars as well so I suppose Steve will probably be the best judge as to whether it's "spongeworthy" or not ... I'd ask Steve though if he's using it. He's pretty picky. (grin)

[rustleg]

Apr 28, 2012 3:36:17 GMT -5 Kevin McAleavey said:

Steve and Nancy and I go back *ages* together ... we're old friends. We used to LIVE on his forum back in the old days! If "Uncle Steve" doesn't get back to you, write him directly and tell him "Kevin and Nancy from NSClean and BOClean" (that's us!) sent ya and I'm sure he'll get back to you on it.

I know the BSD kids are working on Amazon S3 code for BSD itself, but the project is only partially completed at this time. We haven't pulled in any of it ourselves since we require code for KNOS to be fully cooked. But it's almost there.

That said, it looks like it's just upload, download and manage so it probably will work as intended. Doesn't seem to have any crypto management in that so you'll probably have to handle that separately. Their site is here with more details:

www.s3fox.net/

I don't see why it wouldn't work in the Firefox shipped with KNOS, but I note that their last update was over a year ago in February of 2011. The reviews show 3 of 5 stars as well so I suppose Steve will probably be the best judge as to whether it's "spongeworthy" or not ... I'd ask Steve though if he's using it. He's pretty picky. (grin)

Have tweeted Steve but I suspect he's inundated with tweets on cloud backup since his last 2 "Security Now" podcasts were entirely devoted to different commercial offerings. This was unusual since having done a topic in one show he usually only comments briefly later in response to a few feedback questions, but it seems he was overwhelmed with tweets from users about these cloud solutions and he based the next whole show on these tweets. It's clearly a hot topic for people.

It's a pity that the BSD Amazon S3 solution won't be ready for KNOS9. Personally I like the S3 route due to the global redundancy offered by Amazon. I wouldn't want to rely on an unknown company to be there when I need them.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Ah ... I suspect I accidentally lead you astray there. What the BSD folks are working on is being able to *run* BSD or KNOS directly from Amazon as a virtual machine there that can be accessed as a VM from anywhere.

Cloud storage on S3 buckets is already a part of KNOS, but it requires a custom build in order to do so since there are some "hardened" items which need to be built for KNOS and inserted into our primary "lockbox" which has to be part of a KNOS build rather than accessible separately.

We are including "fusefs-s3fs" in our distributions, but that would have to be mounted manually for the regular KNOS 9 release with a bit of diddling. But it's in there. A custom build would provide automatics to mount it as a fixed drive in KNOS so you can move things back and forth as though it were a local drive. That's a rather necessary thing for corporate clients.

[rustleg]

Apr 30, 2012 21:07:09 GMT -5 Kevin McAleavey said:

Ah ... I suspect I accidentally lead you astray there. What the BSD folks are working on is being able to *run* BSD or KNOS directly from Amazon as a virtual machine there that can be accessed as a VM from anywhere.

Cloud storage on S3 buckets is already a part of KNOS, but it requires a custom build in order to do so since there are some "hardened" items which need to be built for KNOS and inserted into our primary "lockbox" which has to be part of a KNOS build rather than accessible separately.

We are including "fusefs-s3fs" in our distributions, but that would have to be mounted manually for the regular KNOS 9 release with a bit of diddling. But it's in there. A custom build would provide automatics to mount it as a fixed drive in KNOS so you can move things back and forth as though it were a local drive. That's a rather necessary thing for corporate clients.

I presume what the BSD folks are doing is creating "BSD in the cloud" probably running on Amazon's Elastic Computing thing. So a native backup solution for backup to S3 running in BSD, which is what I was after, is quite different - but I would suspect it would probably be pretty popular.

I believe a pseudo local drive is the sort of thing that many cloud services do and presumably makes operation pretty simple. I haven't gone that route myself since I prefer setting up a template for automatic backup rather than ad hoc putting files in. Maybe I could get the same effect with a simple script if I had a local pseudo drive. I'll keep looking at some of the other solutions you mentioned to me before.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Exactly ... here's the background information on what we did for the KNOS 9 release for our version of the S3FS system that allows mounting Amazon buckets:

code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon

Of course, in a custom build, we'd configure it for specifics. But we did include fusefs-s3fs in KNOS to allow potential custom customers a sniff at the capabilities. For those actively using Amazon's S3 however, there are some interesting "issues" in it in general. Ours is a little less painful than the Linux implementations though.