Lea Gröber: Understanding self-hosting and security through Nextcloud

So many Nextclouders – from enterprise and education to activists and families – decide to self-host their privacy-focused IT infrastructure. What exactly motivates us to self-host? Is this inherently an increased data security risk? What of the grit needed to host your own digital infrastructure? The answers to these questions may surprise you!

Lea Gröber, PhD student in Usable Security @ CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, shares insight from two recent studies exploring motivations in self-hosting and Nextclouders specifically.

We explore the topic of Usable Security and how, in terms of security, the human aspect of your digital infrastructure may be the most important, and yet the least understood. Afterall, “Users are not the enemy.”

Lea and Brent touch on a wide gamut of related topics throughout, including:

• CISPA’s study featuring 1000 Nextcloud instances in understanding self-hoster motivations
• Technological self-determination as a modern fundamental right
• Self-hosting as a socially embedded activity, and a democratic act
• The many multi-layered trust relationships involved in self-hosting
• Are self-hosters more privacy-aware than the general population? (spoiler: no!)

Episode Links

• Vote for Nextcloud in the CloudComputing-Insider Award 2024 – Nextcloud
• Lea Gröber | CISPA
• Lea Gröber | LinkedIn
• To Cloud or not to Cloud: A Qualitative Study on Self-Hosters’ Motivation, Operation, and Security Mindset | CISPA
• To Cloud or not to Cloud: A Qualitative Study on Self-Hosters’ Motivation, Operation, and Security Mindset | USENIX
• Towards Privacy and Security in Private Clouds: A Representative Survey on the Prevalence of Private Hosting and Administrator Characteristics | USENIX
• USENIX Security ’24 | USENIX
• Usable security – Wikipedia
• Usable Security: A Human-Centric Approach | NIST
• Home Assistant
• MagentaCLOUD + T-Systems: Building a 2.2M User Nextcloud – Nextcloud
• Users Are Not the Enemy – Anne Adams and Matina Angela Sasse