Jungle Disk
Encyclopedia
Jungle Disk is an online backup tool
Remote backup service
A remote, online, or managed backup service is a service that provides users with a system for the backup and storage of computer files. Online backup providers are companies that provide this type of service to end users ....

 that stores its data in Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces...

 or Rackspace
Rackspace
Rackspace US, Inc. is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008...

 Cloud Files. It was highlighted by Amazon as one of the earliest S3 clients The basic Jungle Disk software is sold as a monthly subscription model, and the customer is billed directly by Amazon for data storage and transfer.

Jungle Disk can periodically back up selected files or folders. It provides a local webdav server and a local web interface that synchronize to the user's S3/Cloud Files account, optionally encrypting backed up data on the client side. For a monthly fee, the company will provide a hosted web interface and more advanced backup functionality.

Jungle Disk supports Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

 and Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

On October 22, 2008, Jungle Disk entered into an agreement to be acquired by Rackspace
Rackspace
Rackspace US, Inc. is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008...

 Hosting, Inc. Rackspace purchased Jungle Disk in order to expand their cloud hosting services. Although owned by Rackspace, Jungle Disk continued to provide services with no changes to existing customers until November 2009 when the product line up was changed to a subscription-only model.

Criticism

On June 3, 2011, Colin Percival identified two serious weaknesses in Jungle Disk's security:
  • The lack of a Message Authentication Code
    Message authentication code
    In cryptography, a message authentication code is a short piece of information used to authenticate a message.A MAC algorithm, sometimes called a keyed hash function, accepts as input a secret key and an arbitrary-length message to be authenticated, and outputs a MAC...

     means that file corruption (accidental or deliberate) or arbitrary file content insertions will not be detected
  • The use of MD5
    MD5
    The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function that produces a 128-bit hash value. Specified in RFC 1321, MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications, and is also commonly used to check data integrity...

     as a Key derivation function
    Key derivation function
    In cryptography, a key derivation function derives one or more secret keys from a secret value such as a master key or other known information such as a password or passphrase using a pseudo-random function...

    makes it easy to perform a brute-force attack on the Jungle Disk password.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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