Dark Clouds on the Horizon: Using Cloud Storage as Attack Vector and Online Slack Space Martin Mulazzani Sebastian Schrittwieser Manuel Leithner Markus Huber SBA Research SBA Research SBA Research SBA Research Edgar Weippl SBA Research Abstract usage of resources, these centralized storage services have gained momentum in their usage, and the number During the past few years, a vast number of online file of users has increased heavily. In the special case of on- storage services have been introduced. While several of line cloud storage the shared resource can be disc space these services provide basic functionality such as upload- on the provider’s side, as well as network bandwidth ing and retrieving files by a specific user, more advanced on both the client’s and the provider’s side. An online services offer features such as shared folders, real-time storage operator can safely assume that, besides private collaboration, minimization of data transfers or unlim- files as well as encrypted files that are specific and ited storage space. Within this paper we give an overview different for every user, a lot of files such as setup files of existing file storage services and examine Dropbox, or common media data are stored and used by more than an advanced file storage solution, in depth. We analyze one user. The operator can thus avoid storing multiple the Dropbox client software as well as its transmission physical copies of the same file (apart from redundancy protocol, show weaknesses and outline possible attack and backups, of course). To the best of our knowledge, vectors against users. Based on our results we show that Dropbox is the biggest online storage service so far Dropbox is used to store copyright-protected files from that implements such methods for avoiding unnecessary a popular filesharing network. Furthermore Dropbox can traffic and storage, with millions of users and billions be exploited to hide files in the cloud with unlimited stor- of files [24]. From a security perspective, however, the age capacity. We define this as online slack space. We shared usage of the user’s data raises new challenges. conclude by discussing security improvements for mod- The clear separation of user data cannot be maintained ern online storage services in general, and Dropbox in to the same extent as with classic file hosting, and particular. To prevent our attacks cloud storage opera- other methods have to be implemented to ensure that tors should employ data possession proofs on clients, a within the pool of shared data only authorized access technique which has been recently discussed only in the is possible. We consider this to be the most important context of assessing trust in cloud storage operators. challenge for efficient and secure “cloud-based” storage services. However, not much work has been previously 1 Introduction done in this area to prevent unauthorized data access or information leakage. Hosting files on the Internet to make them retrievable from all over the world was one of the goals when the We focus our work on Dropbox because it is the Internet was designed. Many new services have been biggest cloud storage provider that implements shared introduced in recent years to host various type of files file storage on a large scale. New services will offer sim- on centralized servers or distributed on client machines. ilar features with cost and time savings on both the client Most of today’s online storage services follow a very and the operators side, which means that our findings are simple design and offer very basic features to their users. of importance for all upcoming cloud storage services as From the technical point of view, most of these services well. Our proposed measurements to prevent unautho- are based on existing protocols such as the well known rized data access and information leakage, exemplarily FTP [28], proprietary protocols or WebDAV [22], an ex- demonstrated with Dropbox, are not specific to Dropbox tension to the HTTP protocol. and should be used for other online storage services as With the advent of cloud computing and the shared well. We believe that the number of cloud-based storage operators will increase heavily in the near future. stores more then 100 billion files as of May 2011 [2] Our contribution in this paper is to: and saves 1 million files every 5 minutes [3]. Dropbox is mainly an online storage service that can be used • Document the functionality of an advanced cloud to create online backups of files, and one has access storage service with server-side data deduplication to files from any computer or similar device that is such as Dropbox. connected to the Internet. A desktop client software • Show under what circumstances unauthorized ac- available for different operating systems keeps all the cess to files stored within Dropbox is possible. data in a specified directory in sync with the servers, and synchronizes changes automatically among different • Assess if Dropbox is used to store copyright- client computers by the same user. Subfolders can be protected material. shared with other Dropbox users, and changes in shared folders are synced and pushed to every Dropbox account • Define online slack space and the unique problems that has been given access to that shared folder. Large it creates for the process of a forensic examination. parts of the Dropbox client are written in Python. • Explain countermeasures, both on the client and the server side, to mitigate the resulting risks from our Internally, Dropbox does not use the concept of files, attacks for user data. but every file is split up into chunks of up to 4 megabytes The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. in size. When a user adds a file to his local Dropbox Related work and the technical details of Dropbox are folder, the Dropbox client application calculates the hash presented in Section 2. In Section 3 we introduce an at- values of all the chunks of the file using the SHA-256 tack on files stored at Dropbox, leading to information algorithm [19]. The hash values are then sent to the leakage and unauthorized file access. Section 4 discusses server and compared to the hashes already stored on how Dropbox can be exploited by an adversary in var- the Dropbox servers. If a file does not exist in their ious other ways while Section 5 evaluates the feasibil- database, the client is requested to upload the chunks. ity of these attacks. We conclude by proposing various Otherwise the corresponding chunk is not sent to the techniques to reduce the attack surface for online storage server because a copy is already stored. The existing file providers in Section 6. on the server is instead linked to the Dropbox account. This approach allows Dropbox to save traffic and storage costs, and users benefit from a faster syncing process 2 Background if files are already stored on the Dropbox servers. The software uses numerous techniques to further enhance This section describes the technical details and imple- efficiency e.g., delta encoding, to only transfer those mented security controls of Dropbox, a popular cloud parts of the files that have been modified since the storage service. Most of the functionality is attributed last synchronization with the server. If by any chance to the new cloud-paradigm, and not specific to Dropbox. two distinct files should have the same hash value, the In this paper we use the notion of cloud computing as de- user would be able to access other users content since fined in [9], meaning applications that are accessed over the file stored on the servers is simply linked to the the Internet with the hardware running in a data center users Dropbox account. However, the probability of a not necessarily under the control of the user: coincidental collision in SHA-256 is negligibly small. “Cloud Computing refers to both the applica- tions delivered as services over the Internet and The connections between the clients and the Drop- the hardware and systems software in the data box servers are secured with SSL. Uploaded data is centers that provide those services.” ... “The encrypted with AES-256 and stored on Amazons S3 datacenter hardware and software is what we storage service that is part of the Amazon Web Services will call a Cloud.” (AWS) [1]. The AES key is user independent and only In the following we describe Dropbox and related litera- secures the data during storage at Amazon S3, while ture on cloud storage. transfer security relies on SSL. Our research on the transmission protocol showed that data is directly sent 2.1 Dropbox to Amazon EC2 servers. Therefore, encryption has to be done by EC2 services. We do not know where the Since its initial release in September 2008 Dropbox keys are stored and if different keys are used for each has become one of the most popular cloud storage file chunk. However, the fact that encryption and storage provider on the Internet. It has 10 million users and is done at the same place seems questionable to us, as 2 Amazon is most likely able to access decryption keys 1. Early publications on file retrievability [25, 14] check if a file can be retrieved from an untrusted third party After uploading the chunks that were not yet in the without retransmitting the whole file. Various papers Dropbox storage system, Dropbox calculates the hash propose more advanced protocols [11, 12, 20] to ensure values on their servers to validate the correct transmis- that an untrusted server has the original file without re- sion of the file, and compares the values with the hash trieving the entire file, while maintaining an overall over- values sent by the client.