Mozilla has just released a new service, Firefox Send,  to share files with a higher level of security. Firefox Send is quite easy to use, just access the web-page and upload a file (up to 1GB, one needs to register to upload files up to 2,5GB). The service then returns a link to download the file which the user can choose to be valid up to 1 week and to 100 downloads. For an extra layer of security, the user can also add a Password which is then requested before the download.

Under the hood, the file is encrypted and decrypted in the browser of the user using the Web Crypto API and 128-bit AES-GCM. A short description of how encryption is implemented is provided in this page. The secret encryption key is generated by the browser and appended to the link returned by the server for the download, as in (this is not a valid URL)

h[…]s://send.firefox.com/download/b86[…]c92/#jRBroPSur7e8t_wI6-E67w

where the last part of the URL is the secret key.

This is very nice and simple, but to achieve a higher level of security the user has to find a secure way to share with her parties the download link, and sending it by email is not a good idea.

Obviously the use of a Password which can be communicated in other ways (eg. by telephone) makes it more secure. Still the Password is used to create a signing key (with HMAC SHA-256) and uploaded to the server. Then the server checks that a user requesting the file knows the Password by making her sign a nonce. So the Password is not used to encrypt the file but only for an authentication exchange.

I have not found a full security and threat scenario description for this service (some information can be found here and here), but it would be nice to know which are the use-cases that Mozilla has considered for it. Moreover, from a very quick look at the available documentation, it is not very clear to me which are the information that the server can access during the full life-cycle of an uploaded encrypted file.

In any case, Firefox Send seems to be a new and possibly very interesting competitor in the arena of online file sharing services together with Dropbox, Google Drive etc.