Last month at Dropbox Open London, we unveiled a new technology preview: Project Infinite. Project Infinite is designed to enable you to access all of the content in your Dropbox—no matter how small the hard disk on your machine or how much stuff you have in your Dropbox. Today, we’d like to tell you more—from a technical perspective—about what this evolution means for the Dropbox desktop client.
Traditionally, Dropbox operated entirely in user space as a program just like any other on your machine. With Dropbox Infinite, we’re going deeper: into the kernel—the core of the operating system. With Project Infinite, Dropbox is evolving from a process that passively watches what happens on your local disk to one that actively plays a role in your filesystem. We have invested the better part of two years making all the pieces fit together seamlessly. This post is a glimpse into our journey.
Starting from first principles
Our earlier prototypes around solving the “limited disk-space problem” used something called FUSE or Filesystems in Userspace. FUSE is a software interface that lets non-privileged users create their own filesystems without needing to write a kernel extension. It is part of the kernel itself on some Unix-like operating systems and OS X has a port that is available as a dedicated kernel extension and a libfuse library that needs to be linked by a program in user space.
Performance
libfuse user space library). There’s quite a lot going on, as you can see in the illustration below.
Security
We take security seriously. We do everything we can to protect our users and their data. This includes having internal Red Teams, running a bug-bounty program, and hiring external pen-testers on a regular basis to help us discover vulnerabilities in our products.
So Instead…
But wait! There’s more!
As we’ve been building out our kernel extension, we have also begun to look at what other long-standing user problems we can solve. It turns out there’s a lot we can do.
We’ve seen the number of companies that rely on Dropbox Business soar past 150,000 since we launched it just three years ago. With so many teams on Dropbox, we increasingly hear about a scenario we call the “untrained intern problem.” Imagine you are working with a bunch of other people on a project and collaborating through a Team folder on Dropbox. Summer is quickly approaching and you’ve brought on an intern. The intern, never having used Dropbox before, moves a folder from inside their Team folder to their Desktop, not realizing that they’ve simultaneously removed access to this folder for everyone else in the company. Now of course this folder could be restored, but don’t you wish there was a better way so this could have been prevented from even happening?
KAUTH_SCOPE_VNODE scope, we can detect and deny actions that happen in the Dropbox folder. In the examples cited above, for example, we are interested in the KAUTH_VNODE_DELETE and KAUTH_VNODE_ADD_FILE actions since they allow us to check whether a file or folder in a user’s shared folder is being deleted or moved. From there, it’s just a matter of checking with the user whether the operation was in fact intended and inform them of the consequences of the operations for other members of the folder. As you can see below, this solution is much simpler than a FUSE implementation would have been, and involves no third-party dependencies.
So if you’re someone who compulsively monitors the list of loaded kernel extensions on your system (there are dozens of us, dozens!) and you see com.getdropbox.dropbox.kext you now know why!