101–110 of 151 posts
Why use and popularize a 3rd party stored personal notes app at all? I'm well aware that this is how a lot of people do this sort of trading convenience for genuine security.
But we (well, maybe not people here) could put more effort into solutions that don't require a money making middleman, since the tech is here to solve this problem without it.
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…
This statement, and this way or extremist thinking is the classic no true soctsman fallacy. Taken to the extreme it goes back to trusting trust, and not everyone is a cryptographer who wants to verify the encryption is strong and implimented correctly. Privacy is a sliding scale and people have different threat models.
The statement is also so broad that applying it as a specific issue with E2EE seems foolish - after all the same could be said for any website. You're trusting that Amazon doesn't maliciously update their website to start sending passwords or credit card numbers in plaintext. Hopefully this example demonstrates why encryption in transit is useful.
Just as encryption in transit has tradeoffs (mainly caching), so does E2EE. The benifit of E2EE is data at rest - the server owner cannot suddenly decide to decrypt your data for their means. As you've outlined, for strong privacy this requires tradeoffs (local calculation, more complex systems). As you've also outlined E2EE is also not a magic bullet (trust the client), but that doesn't suddenly discount all of the benifits.
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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.
Of course I'm not suggesting that service providers shouldn't have robust processes to protect against rogue employees. What I'm suggesting is that from the customer's perspective, if you're running a client that was distributed to you from the provider, you should be just as worried about a rogue employee putting something malicious in that client to e.g. compromise the E2EE as you are worried about a rogue employee…
Standard Notes is a note taking app that provides end-to-end encryption: https://standardnotes.com/
It’s the best cross platform one I could find a few months ago. Its conflict resolution isn’t great. Looking for a replacement that handles write-write conflicts better.
You forgot to mention the biggest downside to not encrypting the notes: your company can read/edit them on a whim. Sure, E2EE isn't perfect but it sure is a PITA for vendors to steal data behind their users' back.
The solution to "E2EE is hard" is definitely NOT to ditch it altogether. Nothing is perfect. As a software vendor it should be mandatory to have E2EE in place. It doesn't matter if it's notes or emails or messages. I, the user, should decide what is private and important - not you.
> Should Your Notes Be End-to-End Encrypted? Yes. That's why I use Joplin (which is free and open source btw) and not some proprietary freemium app that to explains me that I don't necessary need E2E encryption for my notes.
Do you have something that allows you to publish that as well? Use case - I want to keep some notes for myself e2e on my laptop & phone but every now and then I'd like to publish a few of them under a pseudonym anonymously on the internet.
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I generally agree with your points but would point out that when I exported all my evernote data a few years ago it came to about 15gb, mostly because I use a lot of photographs and diagrams in my notes. I don't know anything about this note platform but if it allows multimedia embedding then the data can balloon quite rapidly.
The photographs can be retrieved as needed while still being encrypted and not impeding text search.
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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.
But things like encryption help build trust. They ensure that there are safeguards in place in case something gets compromised. They reduce number of bad actors from unlimited to just one (the vendor).
In my opinion, all these are very good reasons to always opt for E2EE even if it isn't perfect.
> 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?
This is why I like what the folks over at Notesnook are doing with Vericrypt [0], which essentially allows users to verify the encryption themselves in a very easy to use way.