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Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

supernotes.app

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

#121

Post by jrm4 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #118
jrm4 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with an app that doesn't use a 3rd party, you don't have to much worry about E2EE at all, as I understand it. E.g. Syncthing + Markor.

So instead of a third party, I'm expected to install and run my own syncing service on the open internet and all of the security patching/monitoring is up to me? I'd still want E2EE for that since if someone breaks the syncing service they'd have access to all of my notes.

Yes. And not sure why you're dramatizing it so hard, the best security/patching/monitoring comes from free and open source software, and the biggest fails tend to come from third parties that I (or more importantly, everybody else) can't monitor.

This is all the whole entire point of software freedom. It's not that it's perfect, but it is as good, frequently better, than third parties. Weird how this is controversial.

Try syncthing. But if not that, I mean, rsync, which is what the big boys rely on anyway.

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

#122

Post by TheRealNGenius »

Assuming that you're not a famous A-list celebrity/influencer or something, or some high ranking exec at a publicly traded company, I'd wager that the answer is no. In fact, most headlines phrased as questions can be answered in the negative.

Quite simply, no one cares about you, much less your notes.

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

#123

Post by orthecreedence »

hedora wrote: post #69
lenova wrote: post #25

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.

Avoid Turtl for now, it's e2ee but last-write-wins at the note level. I'm exploring moving to a CRDT model sometime soon.

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

#124

Post by orthecreedence »

hedora wrote: post #72
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.

> Our team will never read or access your note content, unless we have received your express permission during a customer support interaction So, where is this available? Services with this security property are illegal in the US, and most other countries. (Warrants and bankruptcy courts are two reasons.)

What? Any cloud-based e2ee app has this property and is perfectly legal in the US, at least for the time being.

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

#125

Post by orthecreedence »

tobeagram wrote: post #42

Co-founder of Supernotes, Tobias, here! I thought I'd try to tackle some of most common questions in one go. To start Supernotes is very different from many other note-taking apps – we are focusing on the social aspect of sharing knowledge with your friends via markdown notecards [1], rather than local-first note-taking apps of which there are many to choose from if that is what you prefer. As a small team of two, tr…

I have a social notes app (Turtl: https://turtlapp.com/) and it is end-to-end encrypted. It takes a bit of architecting, but the concept is completely doable.

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

#126

Post by orthecreedence »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #97

The important part: > Our app, Supernotes, is not E2EE That should have been at the top, and saved me two minutes. If someone develops a usable, cross platform, e2ee notes app with collab/sharing features, I'll gladly pay good money to use it.

Try Turtl (https://turtlapp.com). Disclosure: I built it. It's actually end-to-end encrypted (ie, don't lose your password) and has collaboration features. I've mentioned elsewhere in this post that the conflict resolution is terrible, and also I haven't done a release in quite some time, but I'm (slowly) working on an updated version at the moment (hopefully with better conflict resolution).

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

#127

Post by adastra22 »

fastball wrote: post #12
adastra22 wrote: post #8

Great explanation of end-to-end encryption, followed by "but we're too lazy to do that." Not going to ever touch Supernotes now.

Author here! If you 100% need E2EE for your notes then not using Supernotes is actually our recommendation as well. But as I tried to show in the post, it's hard to do and arguably even harder to prove that it has been done correctly. And E2EE not done correctly might as well not be done at all. And yep, partly it is that don't have the time to dedicate to this. There are so many other features that I think would bet…

I'm a security professional, btw. There are avenues like social key recovery which could be used to prevent absolute data loss, and UI approaches which ensure the user actually wrote down their recovery key (e.g. prevent copy and paste and have them type it in on the next screen, where it is not visible).

More to the point, sorting these sorts of things out is kinda what why your users are paying you. I would have been okay with "we want to make sure our users don't experience data loss, so we're still working on the right implementation of E2EE" (as long as you actually working on it). But outright declining to implement E2EE is user-hostile. As noted by the sibling comment, in 2022 privacy is non-negotiable.

(Also I don't think you're adequately considering the liability you're exposing yourself to by holding your user's data unencrypted. What if some HR exec decides to make a note with all their employees social security numbers, addresses, and contact information, and then there's a data breach?)

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

#128

Post by adastra22 »

samsquire wrote: post #61
adastra22 wrote: post #8

Great explanation of end-to-end encryption, followed by "but we're too lazy to do that." Not going to ever touch Supernotes now.

Why do you say that in such a tone as if to inflict spite? If you knew how hard it was to write E2EE you would be more respectful of others honesty.

I'm a professional cryptographer who has implemented E2EE.

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

#129

Post by fastball »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #90
fastball wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having a preference is different from saying something is FUD. It's not FUD to say that there is still a lot of faith/trust required in the gap between "this app claims to be E2EE" and "this app is perfectly E2EE with no holes in an ongoing manner so my content is actually secure". Especially because it's much harder for a notes app to have encryption features like Perfect Forward Secrecy.

It is a very common pattern that an app which claims to be secure turns out not to be. In fact I would say that claim to be secure and actually live up to that are probably the exception rather than the rule.

This is why we self-host 99% of the content related to managing Supernotes (as a business) on Supernotes itself, but (a small minority of) sensitive content we keep in 1Password, which is one of the few apps I trust to have done E2EE well enough for me to feel that data is secure.

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

#130

Post by v4dok »

What about things like Trusted Execution Environments? I know that people love bashing them for being broken, but realistically speaking.. if you don't have malicious nation state level actor in your threat model(since legally there is no way to get the data, only by breaking it, and even then with a lot of asterisks), they could help a lot with moving things server side in an encrypted form.
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