Encryption is one of the most important features that Sprend provides to its users. What exactly it means and how it is different to send your files when you use it, we tried to explain in an interview with the creator of the service and director of Sprend, Arne Evertsson. We hope it will help you better understand and use our service in the future.

How secure is Sprend service and is it one of your priorities?

Sprend is as secure as you want it to be. If you want to be safe, you actually need to encrypt files before you send them. I guess that's true for any kind of file transfer service. You could install something like WinZip or any other kind of software that provides encryption. After you encrypt the important file on your own computer, you can send it however you like. Sprend, of course, uses the regular encryption that you have for websites, so called SSL or TLS, also known as HTTPS, that encrypts everything that goes between your computer and our server. And when the files have arrived on our side, they are, for Sprend Free users, stored unchanged in the same format as you have them on your computer.

In short, if they are not encrypted when you send them, they will actually not be encrypted on our service, unless you pay for our Pro version where you have the option to set a password. In that case, the files will be encrypted as soon as they arrive on the Sprend servers. The technology is called Advanced Encryption Standard, AES-256 with a salted password.

Can anyone see the content of a file after setting a password?

After setting a password, the file comes encrypted on our hard drives, so that not even anyone from Sprend can decrypt or see what the content is.

Who is using this service the most?

That's a good question. We have some customers who use Sprend just for the encryption feature for sending confidential documents. Maybe they have customers who require it or they have the laws that are making it necessary regarding GDPR. Some government agencies in Sweden are using our service. Very happy with it. Probably because it's safe as well as works really well for sending files.

How would you describe the encryption to the average user?

I get that question sometimes from people, we are obviously not doing a good enough job explaining that directly on sprend.com.

Encryption is taking a file like a Word document, a PDF file, a music or video file, simply anything that anybody could easily watch or see on a computer or a phone, and then scramble the bits and the bytes that are stored on the hard drive into something that basically no program can actually read and display in any way.

If you open that in a program for viewing text, you will see just random characters. If you open it in an application for viewing photographs, you would just see noise. And if you open it in a video player, it wouldn't be able to play it. And when you play it as music, it would just be something like a signal from space, like a complete noise. And only when you kind of run this program “backwards” with the password, you get back your file in the original format. But again, you need the password.

You're still answering the support calls, even after 15 years, could you explain what's the main reason?

I want feedback. Of course, I also want to hear if something is not working so we can improve it. I would like to hear that we’re doing good things as well. When I use a service online and I have some kind of trouble, I would like somebody to help me and take it seriously. Just try to provide the service to others that you would yourself wish for. Not that difficult to figure out, is it? We are available at +46101292910 or support@sprend.com.

Do you often get questions about encryption?

Users are generally confused by the encryption option. Seems like a good thing but they are not sure what it means and whether they should mark this option when sending something. It's important to emphasize that the files sent by Sprend are secure. However, if you want an additional level of security, where it is impossible for anyone but you and the recipient to see the content, then you need to choose the encryption option with a password of your choice.

What is the feature you’re the most proud of?

Well, we are trying to make file transfer simple, a lot easier than other services or other ways of transferring data. That has always been the main goal. And I think we have been successful in that. Even though we can still make improvements. I can go on about this topic for quite a long time. Maybe I should, and I have some ideas of how to make it.

Keyhole — Photo by Deleece Cook (Unsplash)

My last question would be, what are the new features that your users can expect in the near future?

First of all, we are releasing the feature to send more than one file at a time. We haven't had that right now. Our users have to zip their files before they can send them as one big archive, and we will make it possible to drag and drop several files in folders, so that would be the most wanted new feature that we will deliver very soon.

After that, I think we have lots of options, but some of them deal with making it easier to log in and sign up for the service. So that won't be as tedious as it is right now. A lot of people could benefit from that. Not only those who want SSO (single sign-on) but also those single users who just have one account.

But then I was talking about before; when you receive a file, I would like to make it possible to preview that file or to watch that film. Sometimes the user knows it's a video file, but cannot open it. So right now, there's nothing we can do about it, but tell them to ask the sender to send it again in a different format, or maybe to search on the Internet and see if there's some kind of software they need to install. But usually, that's not what the user wants to hear. That's a complex solution. They want to just play the file and be happy with it. We can make it possible to preview a file format that your computer does not know how to open or play. We can add that feature within Sprend, increasing the likelihood that you actually can view the document or see the movie or photo.

To summarize, during the development of a service, there is one common goal?

Yes, and that goal is always to remove annoying things and make things easier. Just go ahead and Send a file or check out our Plans & Prices.

How we encrypt your files for quickly and secure transfer

A matter of trust

Different views with the same goal