Details on inner workings of public access

Hi, 

I am interested in the public access feature that My cloud provides, but before buying it I want to understand the security features and how it allows external apps to connect back into private network. 

Can someone point me to a link describing this architecture? 

Thanks,

Parth

parthpatel.exo,

At this moment a detailed explanation of the architectural and firmware behavior of the WD My Cloud is not available. As a consumer-level device it is designed for ease-of-access, and as such it uses port-forwarding to enable remote connections. These remote connections are in turn tied to individual E-mail accounts and codes for independent Users previously created on the Dashboard management console of the device.

that means anyone can access the open port from outside the network?

how do you protect against port scan and types of attacks that can follow once an open port is found?

is that traffic encrypted? because if i access my files from my mobile phone on internet, i dont want the files to travel all of internet in plain text.

I know the traffic running through the wd2go.com site is running through https, so at least that’s encrypted. I can’t speak to whether the traffic to/from a mobile device is encrypted, but I would assume that if they’ve implemented encryption from one access option, they would have encrypted all access options. Again, though, I don’t know for sure.

parthpatel.exo,

The information is always traveling through our own private, dedicated servers before it reaches the target destination. As such, we are able to guarantee data traffic protection and privacy.

So what you are saying is that when I access the content from my own android device from outside the home network/via internet, it first goes through WD network instead of my mobile device making a direct connection to the drive and fetching it from there? 

Why would I want my personal information travelling through WD network? What is the difference between Dropbox and WD then?! 

WD just doesn’t store the info, but it will always have access to fetch information from my drive. 

This just sounds wrong architectural choices from privacy perspective and defeats the purpose of buying such a device. 

I don’t quite get what you’re looking for here. You want a secure connection, but you don’t want WD servers to provide you with a secure connection?

From the little amount of time I’ve spent with this drive, I can already see how their setup is done with ease-of-use in mind. I don’t have to worry about my ISP changing my IP address, I don’t have to worry about managing FTP servers, or port forwarding, or any of that **bleep**. I plug the drive in, log into my mycloud.com account remotely, and I have secure access. I don’t care that the data is going through the WD servers to provide security, so long as it’s secure. What I care about is having NAS access at home, and cloud access away without any of the headaches of remote accessing the drive. That’s exactly what the mycloud drive does for me.

Yes that’s exactly what you want, not me. 

I want ability to access my drive directly without WD coming in the middle. They can host the ip address temporarily and yes I understand that need, but there is no need to route the data through WD site (if that is the case as evident from the post above by WD staff). If I wanted my data to go through WD site, I would just buy skydrive or google drive instead…

parthpatel.exo,

I understand your concerns. As an alternative, the WD My Cloud features direct FTP access.

Please visit the following link for additional information:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2680/

thanks for alerting me about that. I had chosen the product precisely for not having a middle man in the way. just cancelled my order. Any ideas what an alternative would be, except for smithing my own raspberry pi based platform?