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Comment on Researchers reverse-engineer the Dropbox client: What it means

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Does Dropbox not use Amazon S3 as their storage engine anyway? This should have an open API?

Dropbox does have an API, https://www.dropbox.com/developers but this is about reverse engineering the client which seems to use things not here -- in particular, some authentication stuff. I haven't read in depth about why that allowed them to bypass 2-factor auth though.

From the whitepaper (https://github.com/kholia/dedrop/blob/master/paper/accepted/...):

We found that two-factor authentication (as used by Dropbox) only protects against unauthorized access to the Dropbox’s website. The Dropbox internal client API does not support or use two-factor authentication!

Don't they use S3 internally? I assumed the desktop client does not access S3 directly, but that their server is middleware.

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