Arc

Security and privacy

file encryption archiver

SHOW HN2016

72points
43comments
#532of 2,264 in 2016
Top 24%of 2016 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

1 positive, 6 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 4 critical, out of 11 comments about the project. Thread score -0.24.

Design: 0 for, 2 againstIdea: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Commenter hopes the project gets more traction

    From 1 comment
    • Just a couple of commits from one contributor. I'll keep an eye on it; hope it gets more traction.
      grep4master on HN

Objections

  • Duplicates the unix pattern of piping tar into gpg

    From 2 comments
    • This seems counter to the "unix philosophy". I would expect to use an archiving tool piped into an encryption tool. I'm not sure of the utility of something that combines the two.
      LeoPanthera on HN
    • Seems like it would be more unix-like to just pipe tar into gpg.
      spilk on HN
  • Name collides with the historical arc archive format

    From 1 comment
    • The name arc has namespace collision problems. Not in software in general (I never complained about somebody calling their language elm - that's Cantrill's job), but in archivers…
      qwertyuiop924 on HN
  • Unclear whether it requires a server component

    From 1 comment
    • It's not clear from the README ... is this a client/server app, wherein I need to have 'arc' living on the server side ? Or can I just point arc to SSH/SFTP and the server can be…
      rsync on HN

Requests

  • Support random-access extraction of single files

    From 2 comments
    • This is the first that I've heard of ChaCha for encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20#ChaCha_variant). Apparently it's a standard that Google is pushing to replace…
      josho on HN
    • Your understanding is backwards. Stream ciphers are fundamentally compatible with random-access decryption, so yes this is entirely possible. That said, authentication of a…
      stouset on HN
  • Compare with borg

    From 1 comment
    • Can the author compare and contrast to 'borg' which, it appears, has become the de facto standard for this kind of work ?
      rsync on HN

Questions

  • Which HMAC verifies archive contents before decryption

    From 1 comment
    • What HMAC is used to verify the contents of the archive before decryption takes place?
      valarauca1 on HN
  • How it differs from tarsnap's client

    From 1 comment
    • Why use this over tarsnap's client (which is also free software and has features like local deduplication).
      cyphar on HN

Alternatives named

  • gpg and gpg-zip

    From 1 comment
    • Cool! I usually use gpg-zip for this purpose on machines where I have gpg installed. ``` gpg-zip --symmetric --gpg-args --cipher-algo=AES256 --output backup.tar.gpg file1 file2…
      Pirate-of-SV on HN
  • tar piped into gpg

    From 1 comment
    • Seems like it would be more unix-like to just pipe tar into gpg.
      spilk on HN
  • tarsnap

    From 1 comment
    • Why use this over tarsnap's client (which is also free software and has features like local deduplication).
      cyphar on HN
  • borg

    From 1 comment
    • Can the author compare and contrast to 'borg' which, it appears, has become the de facto standard for this kind of work ?
      rsync on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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