Services/Sync/NextGen

Overview

Sync is a highly useful feature, but has so far failed to achieve widespread adoption. We believe Sync to be an important piece of the Firefox experience, and our goal is to deliver a much more attractive product to support continued Firefox growth. We are tentatively targeting Firefox 20 as the GA for this new version of the service.

Use Cases

Needs a narrative for each

v1

• A Firefox user with multiple devices (desktop or mobile) who wants to have their awesomebar and passwords available on all of their devices.

• A Firefox user setting up a new/replacement device wants to get up and running with their full Firefox experience as fast as possible.

• A Firefox user who wants to back up their data easily and safely, and only has a single device.

• A Firefox user who wants to have the option of secure syncing between devices, using a strong key they manage themselves. (Parity with/comparisons to Chrome Sync, OS X Lion DiskVault).

TBD

• A Firefox user who has lost their device, and their Persona password, and wants to recover their data should be able to recover everything except for passwords (and any future auth data we start syncing, such as client certificates).

• Firefox can link external services to user data on the server side.
  • Hypothetical example would be to connect del.icio.us to a user's bookmarks, and the service would connect to the server store directly, instead of requiring a client plug-in.
  • This would involve storing data in plaintext, and would almost certainly be opt-in for those users who want to use the service, possibly in the same service, or in a special-built service like AITC.

User Data covered by the feature

• Feature and defaults parity with the current Firefox Sync offering, unless there is data to support different choices.

High level technical description

coming later today

Open Questions

Product Questions

• Are we still planning to ship old and new Sync products in parallel, or are we doing migration on upgrade? (Asa)
  • mconnor: This has a non-zero cost, and we're talking about 0.5% of Firefox users. We can do it, but it adds difficult-to-scope time/complexity.

• J-PAKE as an option for users? (Asa)
  • mconnor: Not required for sure, but if we're allowing users to provide their own keys, manual entry really sucks on mobile. NFC could be a future option, making this unnecessary, but we should decide this explicitly. The cost to maintain/preserve is not dramatically high, but is of course more than zero.

• Is recovery after password reset a required v1 use-case? (Asa, Karen, mconnor)
  • mconnor: Timeline/model for an escrow service is as yet undefined, adding substantial schedule risk. My recommendation is that this is a nice-to-have for v1 of the new service.

• What degree of durability is required for data stored on the service? (Asa, mconnor)
  • mconnor: This is going to be a budget question. It needs a cost/benefit tradeoff from mmayo's team. From prior discussions, more than 99.9999999% will be much more expensive, but 1 in a billion feels pretty okay.

• Is there a per-user uptime requirement? (Asa, mconnor)
  • mconnor: I would propose 99.9% for any given user's data access, at the high end. This is the high end of what is viable with a single datacenter, and multi-datacenter would be prohibitively expensive.

Technical Questions

• Is the key storage (wrapped master key) service a part of the Preferred Idp API, or is it an Identity Attached Service? (Ben, mconnor)

• What is the timeline for delivering key-wrapping as a capability? (Ben, bwarner)

• Are any further changes required to the 2.0 protocol? (gps, rnewman, rfkelly)

• Are there any further changes required to the v6 storage format? (gps)