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Show HN: Mini-Diarium - An encrypted, local, cross-platform journaling app

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Re: Show HN: Mini-Diarium - An encrypted, local, cross-platform journaling app

#53

Post by holyknight »

sneak wrote: post #52

key reuse, and probably other issues in a homebrew cryptosystem that wraps AES. is there a reason we aren’t using high level crypto libraries in 2026?

Thanks for the feedback. This is why I built it FOSS.

On the libraries: Mini Diarium actually does use established, widely audited crates rather than rolling its own primitives. See https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs for AES-256-GCM, https://github.com/RustCrypto/password-hashes for key derivation, and https://github.com/dalek-cryptography/curve25519-dalek + https://github.com/RustCrypto/KDFs for the key file ECIES scheme. The thin cipher.rs wrapper just handles nonce prepending with no custom crypto primitives.

On key reuse: the master key is intentionally shared across entries (as in Signal, 1Password, etc.), but each encrypt() call generates a fresh 96-bit nonce from the OS CSPRNG, so the (key, nonce) pair is never repeated.

That said, I am not a security expert by any means. If you've spotted something concrete, a specific call site, a protocol flaw, or a library you'd swap in, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Open to PRs or a discussion issue.

Regards

Re: Show HN: Mini-Diarium - An encrypted, local, cross-platform journaling app

#56

Post by guiambros »

danpalmer wrote: post #54

Some feedback, a screenshot of the main app experience rather than the login screen might help.

You can reload the page. It's an animated gif that shows the full app functionality.

But your feedback is still valid. It's unfortunate that OP used the login screen as the last frame; it'd be better to show the app as the last frame, or just loop the animation.

Re: Show HN: Mini-Diarium - An encrypted, local, cross-platform journaling app

#57

Post by danpalmer »

guiambros wrote: post #56
danpalmer wrote: post #54

Some feedback, a screenshot of the main app experience rather than the login screen might help.

You can reload the page. It's an animated gif that shows the full app functionality. But your feedback is still valid. It's unfortunate that OP used the login screen as the last frame; it'd be better to show the app as the last frame, or just loop the animation.

Oh yeah, neat. I completely missed that because it was on the last frame and not at all apparent that it had previously animated.
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