ente - e2ee alternative to Google/Apple Photos

[vishnukvmd]

Hey team,

Founder of ente here. 👋

ente is an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google / Apple Photos, that is equally easy to use.

We launched on HackerNews and r/degoogle a few months ago and received a warm welcome, becoming one of the most upvoted posts of all time on both the forums (ShowHN, r/degoogle/top).

Is it possible to add ente under the Cloud Storage section? We would love to reach a broader audience.

I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thanks for all the hard work! :)

Best,
Vishnu

[dngray]

I thought I had responded to this somewhere. I'll put this on our to-do list to give a look at.

It seems to fit an interesting niche that isn't really targeted by other products.

[d4rklynk]

Just putting the discussion back on top. I would like to know how the research is going.

[tx71]

I'm also very interested to see what comes out of the research! Without having any in-depth knowledge about encryption, to me ente seems to be the perfect replacement for Google Photos. Would be nice to have that backed up by Privacy Guides :)

[dngray]

Hi,

I've been having another look at this and trialing it with some images. The software works well enough and does make sense to users who might want to share family albums via email without attaching photos to emails, so I think there is definitely a use case for the current feature set.

@vishnukvmd

I'm wondering whether there are any plans to have this formally vetted.

I looked at the architecture document mentioned on the about section. I noticed that you state:

Our architecture has been reviewed by cryptographers and engineers from IBM Research, ETH Zurich, IIT Delhi, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, ...

What I am curious about is whether there will be a formal report or letter of attestation as it's quite easy to "namedrop" some large companies, even if they haven't had anything to do with the design. (Not saying you're doing that, but there are individuals and companies who might).

[vishnukvmd]

Hey @dngray, thanks for checking out ente!

Apart from sharing links, you can also auto-sync albums (for example I sync "Camera" with my partner) and create collaborative albums where multiple parties can contribute photos (even without an app or account), all e2ee. I understand you may not personally need these, just calling out our value proposition :)

Our documents on architecture and reliability were reviewed by friends and acquaintances. Penetration tests were performed in the past by @FallibleInc. If you could please share an example for a letter of attestation, I will reach out to them and request for one.

Thank you!

[d4rklynk]

Penetration testing should be done in an official way for us to recommand a product.

[dngray]

If you could please share an example for a letter of attestation, I will reach out to them and request for one.

Sure, a good example of that would be the ones produced by Securitum.

They mention key things about the the audit such as:

• Who completed the audit with a brief description of their background/experience/
• When it was audited
• Scope, (software, network, infrastructure etc)
• The version audited, and commit id
• How long it took
• How many vulnerabilities and the severity (according to CVSS) of them, there's a rather neat calculator there
• If any recommendations were made, and if so, how many.

[dngray]

We have a thread starting here https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/ente-photo-management/11763 as we're in the process of deprecating GitHub discussions.