The founders of the cloud encryption service BoxCryptor announced this week that Dropbox has acquired the company's intellectual product. According to the announcement on the official Boxcryptor blog, Dropbox acquired IP technology from Boxcryptor, but not customer data.
Dropbox plans to use the technology to bring zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption to its products. Boxcryptor will work on embedding its encryption technology into Dropbox products.
Existing Boxcryptor customers will continue to be serviced by the company for the duration of their license and from German data centers. No customer data is transferred to Dropbox servers according to the announcement.
Boxcryptor plans to service existing customers "through the duration of their contracts". The service was offered to individuals, business and Enterprise customers. Individuals could use a limited free version of Boxcryptor or could sign-up for business or personal plans. The maximum subscription period appears to have been 3-years for individuals who signed-up for a paid plan.
Team licenses were also provided as 1-year and 3-year licenses. Enterprise customers may have been able to negotiate different support periods. It appears that paying customers will be able to continue using the service for up to 3 years. No word on how free users are affected.
All existing users and customers will receive emails with information soon. Boxcryptor does not accept new account creations or license purchases anymore.
What is happening after the end of support? This is anyone's guess at the time, as Boxcryptor has not revealed the information yet. It looks as if customers won't be able to extend their licenses. If true, customers would have to find a different service to encrypt data in the cloud.
A migration offer to Dropbox may be one of the options for existing Boxcryptor customers.
Boxcryptor Alternative
Boxcryptor users may want to check out Cryptomator instead, which offers a similar product. Cryptomator is an open source solution that is also available for teams. The solution for teams is called Cryptomator Hub.
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