Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

supernotes.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 151 posts

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#81

Post by trinsic2 »

fastball wrote: post #62
trinsic2 wrote: post #34

I read the article but I'm not sure what the objective was in the end. It seem a way to lengthy education course on E2EE. Almost like you're trying to convince someone of something you think they don't need. That usually ends badly in my experience.

Actually the opposite! We have many users that ask about end-to-end encryption and what that means and if we have it, so this blog post was written to try to answer those questions all at once, in what I hope is a way that non-users of Supernotes also find educational. But if any of our users feel like they need E2EE for their notes, we'd like to steer them towards a platform better suited because that's not our prio…

Still sounds like you are trying to convince people that its not needed. I have found that people who spend more energy on explaining why they think something is the way it is ends up being more about them wanting to convince others of an opinion, than stating outright, short and sweet, why you aren't going to implement something. Personally I don't think its necessary to have a big education course one what E2EE is, there is plenty o material on the subject that can be pointed to.

My 2 cents.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#82

Post by lasereyes136 »

basilgohar wrote: post #64
chrismorgan wrote: post #9

One other major downside of end-to-end encryption: everything has to be done client-side, and the server becomes very close to a dumb pipe and block storage. (The only parts the server can do anything with are those that aren’t encrypted, so the explicit goal of E2EE is to reduce the server to a dumb pipe and block storage.) Got ten gigabytes of stuff you want to search through? Without E2EE, the server can implement…

> It kinda amuses me that mobile spent a long time moving both storage, computation and network traffic from the client to the server as much as possible (because the mobile devices had too little of each), and E2EE significantly forces it back the other way. One would hope this would mean that you’d get more just-software rather than software-as-a-service, but no, mostly you just end up with the worst of both worlds…

> This kind of pendulum like, tick-tocking back and forth between things like fat clients/thin-clients, dumb termials/PCs, centralized vs. decentralized (well, cloud-based [i.e., someone else's computer]) applications, and so on, are part-and-parcel of computing that goes as far back as possible. This is just another "tock" in that cycle.

True, this is because all software design and architecture is a set of trade-offs and each trade-off has a downside. Software design and architecture is also very fad-ish in that "the it thing" changed and everyone rushes to use it in order to keep their skills competitive. The fads of IT is a large part of the churn that makes low quality software.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#83

Post by chrismorgan »

eadmund wrote: post #54
chrismorgan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tries to be, but in practice as I say you mostly just end up with the worst of both worlds, because of perverse incentives (the software provider wants to charge a monthly figure and doesn’t want their server to be fungible). Anyway, it’s still much more commonly a limitation than an advantage. Perhaps the most obvious example: I want to be able to search through 10GB of emails without needing to download them all…

> the software provider wants to charge a monthly figure and doesn’t want their server to be fungible Sounds like yet another reason to use free software and pay services for their actual services, like storage. > I want to be able to search through 10GB of emails without needing to download them all (or a not-much-lighter index), because downloading it takes a long time, costs a fair bit (traffic isn’t generally), a…

> 10GB is pretty much nothing nowadays, and once one has downloaded it then one only has to download the updates, not the whole thing from scratch. And local search is so much faster than remote search that it is incredible. Using notmuch for email is such an improvement over the Gmail web UI; it really has to be seen to be believed.

10GB is more space than a very significant fraction of people have available on their devices (more even than some new devices have free). Or want reserved for stuff 99.9999% of which they will absolutely never access. 10GB is also considerably more traffic than many can spare without incurring multiple dollars of cost. 10GB may also take most of a day to download for a great many people. People might also just want to access their stuff on a new device, such as someone else’s computer.

Local search certainly can be faster, but it’s often not. It’ll normally be using different software from what the server uses, too, since the server software is likely to be factored as a server with no direct library equivalent, and my experience is it generally produces inferior results. I know, none of this is inherent, merely typical. But back to performance: you might be surprised at just how slow storage is on cheap phones. Only a few megabytes per second is realistic, and with not enough memory to keep it in there either.

When talking of all this performance stuff, I feel like pointing out that I live in Australia and am used to the internet being slow purely because of latency to US-hosted sites. This definitely tips the balance a bit more in favour of local for me.

By all means, support downloading everything and being able to work offline and doing local search where possible. Please do, because it is better where feasible and is likely to lead to the software being better in other regards too. But for most people most of the time, requiring this is a bad trade-off.

> One still needs encryption from one’s server to another’s. To put that another way: from one’s end to another’s. Or … end-to-end encryption.

NO! This is NOT what is meant by end-to-end encryption. This is transport encryption. And note that E2EE doesn’t obviate transport encryption, because it still protects the metadata.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#84

Post by trinsic2 »

XorNot wrote: post #29

This is why I just use Markdown and Syncthing. Works on every platform I have including my phone and for more then just notes. I really don't like every app reimplementing secure block storage and exchange or whatever.

Thanks for that. Been looking for something like this for a long time.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#86

Post by chrismorgan »

eduction wrote: post #71
chrismorgan wrote: post #9

One other major downside of end-to-end encryption: everything has to be done client-side, and the server becomes very close to a dumb pipe and block storage. (The only parts the server can do anything with are those that aren’t encrypted, so the explicit goal of E2EE is to reduce the server to a dumb pipe and block storage.) Got ten gigabytes of stuff you want to search through? Without E2EE, the server can implement…

I see this kind of pushback from engineers quite often when advocating for privacy first technologies. I think this comment is a good example of the sort of reflexive dismissal many developers have to changing how they work, from being asked to move a bit away from the dominant paradigm of the last 20-30 years (cleartext private data on servers). 1. The idea that it’s impractical to download the data. We are talking…

1. I use the 10GB example to show, by an extreme that is nonetheless completely plausible in many domains (mostly communication apps, the frontrunners for E2EE: email with various attachments, chat with not even a few thousand photos attached, that kind of thing), where the scheme falls apart.

I consider even 10MB more than is ideal to require downloading before you can do anything, in most domains.

Text-only notes? Sure, they’re likely to be adequately small, but I’m talking about downsides of E2EE in general, not just this application.

2. I wasn’t sufficiently clear in the context of the figures I used for client search duration. I was talking most of all of the sorts of devices that can’t manage 50MB/s of I/O, and certainly don’t have enough spare memory to fit the index in RAM, so your big index is simply too big for fast to be possible—and it’ll tend to cause memory pressures that slow everything else down too. Generally speaking on a capable machine, yes, properly-done text search should be considerably faster than your latency. But also in practice apps normally use inferior search techniques than their servers, which I think is because most of the effort has gone into server-style search engines, which are not packaged for embedded/library use. As a super simple example, any mainstream email provider will be doing full text search of emails and of at least some types of attachments (you can be confident of at least PDF, DOC and DOCX), all with features like stemming and spelling correction, but I think it’s probably still true that most local email clients don’t search attachment contents and suspect many won’t do fully proper stemming or offer spelling correction. Just more generally, if you compare the search results of server and client, it’s distressing how often client is kneecapped. This is by no means fundamental.

3. End-to-end encryption is presented as a panacea. “Because it’s end-to-end-encrypted, we can’t see your messages” and the likes. Such statements are lies. They need a big asterisk along the lines of “… until we want to, or a government orders us to”. Yes, E2EE helps in the general case, and if they stopped at that I would hold my peace; but they go further and claim, or deliberately give the impression of, inviolability, when all around the world legislatures, police forces and other governmental bodies are testing the edges of undermining it all, and it would be naive to suppose they will not go further and succeed. And so I say: first-party end-to-end encryption is largely false advertising, them saying “trust us, you don’t have to trust us”.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#87

Post by EGreg »

crabmusket wrote: post #60
EGreg wrote: post #53

The problem with end-to-end encryption, is that you just have to have the vendor’s word for it, and its next client version can be compromised anytime.

Client must be open-source, and clients and servers must be interoperable.

Good luck with that, we don't have any app stores that let third parties verify checksums of open source projects. The trusted computing base is controlled by Google and Apple basically, and they don't allow certificates from third parties who do audits.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#88

Post by tshaddox »

threeseed wrote: post #11

> Our team will never read or access your note content, unless we have received your express permission during a customer support interaction Either naive or dishonest. Can't tell which is worse. The reason end to end encryption exists is to cover the cases which you can't plan for. For example a rogue employee reading the notes of their partner.

In most currently widely-used E2EE systems isn't the provider in control of the client anyway, and thus there's not really any protection against rogue employees? If I'm in control of the client and I'm encrypting all my data before I send it to the cloud storage provider, then sure, I'm safe against rogue employees at the provider accessing my data (although they could still delete it). But the E2EE systems I'm aware of consist of a provider distributing a client that promises to encrypt data between that client and the provider's servers, but not in a way that makes the process easily auditable by the customer.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#89

Post by panick21_ »

tshaddox wrote: post #88
threeseed wrote: post #11

> Our team will never read or access your note content, unless we have received your express permission during a customer support interaction Either naive or dishonest. Can't tell which is worse. The reason end to end encryption exists is to cover the cases which you can't plan for. For example a rogue employee reading the notes of their partner.

In most currently widely-used E2EE systems isn't the provider in control of the client anyway, and thus there's not really any protection against rogue employees? If I'm in control of the client and I'm encrypting all my data before I send it to the cloud storage provider, then sure, I'm safe against rogue employees at the provider accessing my data (although they could still delete it). But the E2EE systems I'm awar…

I don't know how you do things where you work. But a rogue employ making changes to the product, then wide releasing it or releasing it to anybody is not something you can just do.

And if you did somebody would quickly notice and you might go to prison.

That a pretty high barrier to entry compared to just having admin access on the db.

Re: Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

#90

Post by amadeuspagel »

fastball wrote: post #63
amadeuspagel wrote: post #21

> In the end, trust is Still Required™ This entire section is FUD. Trust is "Still Required™" - unfortunately HN doesn't support underlines so I can't get accross the full obnoxiousness of the original formatting - therefore having your data in someone elses database is no worse then using an app that someone might add a backdoor to?

Author here – can't say I agree. If this is FUD, I would assume there is an app you're familiar with which you can say with actual 100% certainty is end-to-end encrypted in a leakproof way?

I don't need to have 100% certainty that an app is end-to-end encrypted in a leakproof way to prefer it to an app that's not end-to-end encrypted at all.
Post reply on HN