JoelM

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  1. I was not sure about the security of the secret too, but then I did some math. Sync uses or did use (I don't know what it currently uses) Base32 encoding. That encoding uses a-z and 2-7 so you have a total of 32 characters to use in the secret. Small example: The secret is limited to 1 character and there is only one shared folder (only one secret is in use, the others are not used). So there is a 3.125% (1/32) chance of collision. It will take up to 32 guesses to find what secret is in use; or 0.640 seconds (based on 20 milliseconds per guess). Those odds sound pretty bad. Real world: The secret is 32 characters. Let's assume that there are 60 trillion shared folders (60 trillion secrets are in use, the rest are not in use). The total number of possible secrets for 32 characters is 1,461,501,637,330,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The chance of a collision with any of those 60 trillion secrets is 0.000000000000000000000000000000004105%. Wolfram|Alpha says it will take up to 1.1*10^15 of the age of the universe (14 billion years) to guess one secret, not a specific one. Thus to guess one random secret it will take up to 15 septillion, 437 sextillion, 700 quintillion years. TL;DR: Basically if every person on the planet was sharing 9,000 folders and trying to guess another secret, then the sun would be out long before one person got someone's secret. (BTW I do not believe that the universe is that old; I'm just using the well-known information as a reference.)