Dropbox has announced a deal to acquire assets from Boxcryptor in an effort to bring end-to-end encryption to its service.
Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud storage services, but it doesn’t have end-to-end encryption like Tresorit and other more security-conscious services. Dropbox is looking to change that by acquiring assets from Boxcryptor. Boxcryptor is an independent service that helps user encrypt their files across a range of cloud services, adding an extra layer of security.
Dropbox announced the deal in a blog post:
Today, we’re excited to share that we’ve signed an agreement to acquire several key assets from Boxcryptor, a provider of end-to-end “zero-knowledge” encryption for cloud storage services. The combination of Boxcryptor’s leading encryption capabilities and Dropbox’s easy-to-use product, with our already robust security features, will help us better meet our customers’ evolving needs.
The only downside to Dropbox’s plans is that it seems Boxcryptor’s features will only be available to business users:
We plan to embed Boxcryptor’s capabilities natively within Dropbox for our business users on our paid plans, adding an additional layer of security by encrypting files locally on their devices prior to syncing their content to Dropbox.
Despite the limitation, Dropbox’s announcement is good news for security-minded customers.