One nice thing about using web-based services is that you rarely need to take charge. You just sign up for an account, and instantly access your data from anywhere on any device without having to know how the internet works, much less how to configure a server. But that lack of control over the process is also, increasingly, the problem. Companies hold your data on their servers, which means it could get used in ways you—and sometimes even they—don't realize. And if a company gets hacked, your data could be stolen regardless of what precautions you personally took.
A startup called Helm, coming out of stealth Tuesday, aims to make it easy for you instead to own your data, and manage it locally on a personal server at home.
Helm has begun accepting orders for simple devices that you can use to store things like photos and videos, and to host your own email, contacts list, and calendar. You set up a Helm server in your house, office, or wherever with a mobile app, and can then access your own personal email server and cloud from all your devices anywhere. And the data on the device can't be copied or accessed without a physical security token for multi-factor authentication.
The idea is to offer similar convenience to third-party web services without having to let your data live in someone else's server farm, thereby reducing your exposure to targeted advertising, government surveillance, and data breaches.
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"This is the first time that people will have an alternative to the existing way they live their lives online," says Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm, who previously worked on mobile security at companies like T-Mobile and the corporate security company Rapid7. "Our goal is to know as little about our customers as possible. When you profit off of people's data and behaviors there are unintended consequences that are starting to come out more and more as a concern. So that's not Helm's business model. We don't have access to your data."
Instead, the business model is a one-time fee of $499 to buy a Helm server. After the first year of ownership, Helm owners pay a $99 annual subscription to maintain the service. The servers come with 128GB of onboard storage and will be expandable up to 5TB. All of which might sound pricey to web users who already run their own personal servers. Hosting your own email is a hallmark for some tech enthusiasts and privacy advocates. But even though it's entirely possible to do it on your own, Sreenivas says Helm wants to make the process accessible to the masses.
"If you rolled your own server you would have to stay on top of patching it, contact your ISP about getting a static IP address, configure reverse DNS, all these things," he says. "Meanwhile most people don't even really understand what the cloud is. So this is a physical place in their homes that they control where they can store all their data. It's approachable."
The vision for Helm draws on fundamental internet concepts, namely that the web is more robust and free when it is decentralized, and everyone contributes a small piece of a larger whole. Helm hopes to extend that to decentralizing personal data storage, so users still get the security and reliability benefits associated with big companies, while retaining physical control of their information and choosing who to share it with. Eventually Helm could expand beyond email and storage into personal VPNs. or even a self-hosted password manager.
"You never know if you’ve thought of everything until something happens, but it certainly appears that they’re trying pretty hard," says Jeremy Gillula, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's tech policy director who got to demo Helm before it launched. "The real test will be do security updates get rolled out on a timely basis, that sort of thing. And that’s something you can only tell after it launches."
Helm will have a lot to prove, both in terms of usability and privacy. The company has built in a lot of fundamental mechanisms, like the ability to import data from other email services and sync between all of a user’s devices through mainstream email clients like Mozilla's Thunderbird and Apple's Mail. But enabling all of this easy setup also creates potential exposures.
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For example, the company will operate and maintain the home servers through a "security gateway" in the cloud. Sreenivas says all data that passes through Helm's systems will be encrypted with Let's Encrypt certificates and unreadable to the company, but the setup does create a dependence on Helm. At launch, Helm will also require users to store encrypted backups of their servers in the company's cloud. Helm plans to add support for other types of backups, though, like mirroring to another Helm server that you keep somewhere else.
"It's hard to say, DIY works for a lot of things until it doesn't," says Kenn White, director of the Open Crypto Audit Project, of a concept like Helm. "And something like this wouldn't really be DIY anyway if you have to rely on another organization's firewall, cloud storage, and proprietary security software. Does the user control what software is applied and when? This seems like a few interesting technical ideas, but ultimately it's a proprietary cloud service."
Helm insists that it has a robust plan for defending the personal servers and patching them long-term. The company has ideas about working to mask Helm servers so they aren't easily visible through internet-wide scans, like the tool Shodan. And Sreenivas says that Helm will only ever have access to users' billing and shipping information from when they purchased their server and the web domain they attach to the server, which users can bring or can choose through Helm at setup. The EFF's Gillula notes, though, that Helm wouldn't necessarily be invulnerable to government wiretap requests or other interference. And both he and White suggest Helm publish a transparency report and third-party audit assessments to give users more insight into the service.
And in trying to market Helm to everyone, the company may also find it difficult to match the convenience of ecosystems like Google’s. Users who rely on Helm will have to give up integrations like those between Gmail and Google Drive or Apple Photos and iCloud. And while privacy advocates might effectively view these limitations as benefits, the mainstream customers Helm is courting may not be as enthusiastic about the tradeoff.
People who are already looking for an easy way to do private data storage—like journalists, activists, or public figures—may be the company's most likely first customers. But at the very least, Helm underscores the tension between data privacy and convenience, and the challenge of attempting to reconcile it in a new way.
Updated October 17, 2018 11am ET with expanded comment from EFF's Jeremy Gillula and the Open Crypto Audit Project's Kenn White.