According to the email, Drive will apply a security update to make file sharing more secure.
But it doesnt change anything about the fundamental security flaws of Google Drives link sharing feature.
Link sharing on Google Drive
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The first is restricted sharing.
Thankfully, in recent years, this feature is being displayedmore prominentlyon the Google Drive sharing dialog.
But so can anyone else who has the link.
generate unique URLs for each document you create.
These URLs should be hard to guess.
Butseveralexperiments have shown that, in fact, many popular cloud storage services were previously vulnerable to URL-guessing attacks.
A few years ago, Google updated its address-generation scheme to make it more difficult to guess document URLs.
Google Drives new security update applies to these files.
It will add an extra parameter to the shared document URL called resourcekey.
But there are still many other ways link-sharing can turn into a security and privacy disaster.
Im not against Google Drive link sharing.
It is not a problem if youre not handling sensitive data.
The problem is that people often use link sharing to collaborate on confidential documents.
And theres no guarantee of it not happening.
But the confusion around link sharing remains.
There should be a clear distinction between sharing and publishing.
When you share a document, it should be limited to the intended recipients and inaccessible.
you’re able to read the original articlehere.
