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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?

#131

Post by fastball »

piaste wrote: post #44
break_the_bank wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hit the Share button in Joplin and select your blogging app of choice. Note-taking and publishing are different enough to deserve being separate apps, especially when the notes can contain private material.

One of our guiding principles with Supernotes is that data staleness is an undesirable property and so we're trying to build a markdown-notecard-first (read: portable) and sharing-first (read: no staleness) notes app.

I touched on the example of a blog in the article in the context of E2EE, but let's forget about E2EE for a second and just look at it from a stale data perspective: you click the share button in Joplin and publish to the blogging app of your choice. Later a reader on the blog points out a few typos so you make some changes in your blogging platform. Now you have a version of your blog post on Joplin that is stale unless you manually copy-paste your changes from the blogging platform back to Joplin. Or you make the changes in Joplin and need to manually republish to the blog somehow.

But what if instead your notes app was a single source of truth and making changes there automatically propagated everywhere you needed – whether semi-privately in the Supernotes collection of a friend, in a shared Notion workspace with your team, or published to the broader internet. That's (one of) our goals with Supernotes.

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

#132

Post by danielheath »

geoduck14 wrote: post #92
jdvh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm biased because I'm working on an E2EE todo/planning app[1], but over the years I've become convinced that E2EE apps are the future. All the syncing code you have to write anyway if you want your app to work offline. Despite all the buzz about big data, most individuals and most companies generate only a modest amount of data. Even when you have a long tail of archived data (e.g. emails that go back 10 year…

Ok, I'll byte. Let's take a hypothetically example that might just happen. Imagine a company has a Wikipedia hosted by a 3rd party. I interpret E2EE as: after I submit a post, it is encrypted, and the servicing company can't look at the unencrypted data, my coworkers can decrypt the posts. It is simple to ask "how would you support linking to posts" - but "how would you support searching for posts"? Would you maintai…

So, searching through encrypted text is a really interesting problem!

It's actually possible under some ciphers / search algorithms - if the client generates encrypted inverted index entries when submitting a post, and encrypts their (vectorized) search query using the same key, the server can compare them and return a scored list of IDs.

You do need to weaken the encryption scheme somewhat - in particular, term-frequency analysis becomes possible.

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

#133

Post by woojoo666 »

yunohn wrote: post #55
ilammy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With E2EE, all the server can do is hand you encrypted blobs. Encrypted search is a thing. You need to know in advance what kind of queries you want to do against your DB, but there are off-the-shelf solutions for encrypted search which do not involve homomorphic encryption. Here's an overview: https://www.cossacklabs.com/blog/secure-search-over-encrypte...

It is possible, but it isn’t very feasible right now. Maybe in the future?

The top-level comment should at least acknowledge that it's possible. We shouldn't just put up our hands and say "it"s impossible/impractical to have E2EE data without overloading our clients", we should be pushing companies to prioritize research into techniques like encrypted search, so that the "future" can come sooner

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

#134

Post by woojoo666 »

samsquire wrote: post #40

All 450+ of my journal entries, notes and computer ideas are unencrypted, public and shared and worked on in the open on GitHub, so are not encrypted except over TLS when I edit them on GitHub when logged in under my account samsquire If you like other people's technical perspectives are looking for ideas or side project ideas to learn of then read my journal For context I am a DevOps and software engineer interested…

Wow this is like an extreme version of "working in the open". If you don't mind me asking, do you have any private notes? Like maybe your workout notes or something? If so, what proportion of your notes would you say you keep private?

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

#135

Post by remram »

tetromino_ wrote: post #114
remram wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What scheme would you use for searching the content of your photographs that requires the full photograph blob to be available for search ?

I might imagine a pipeline where a full photograph blob is downloaded and decrypted on your device, normalized, run through something like image2vec + ocr + metadata extraction, and the result stored in an index. At that point, of course, you could garbage collect the original blob - at least until your app releases an major update version requiring a reindexing of blobs.

So you're saying you DON'T need to keep the photograph on the device, and it can be retrieved as needed, like I was? Your scheme only requires you to keep the index. I don't understand why you asked that question in the first place?

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

#136

Post by hedora »

v4dok wrote: post #130

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.

Hobbyists are pulling keys out of current TPM chips, but why bother with that (it requires physical access), when automated, fully remote attacks are available:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity17/technical...

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

#137

Post by hedora »

orthecreedence wrote: post #124
hedora wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly.

However, they’re advertising a non-e2e app, and then incorrectly claiming they can legally provide this property.

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

#138

Post by hedora »

swah wrote: post #7

No. I have Bitwarden for that and prefer all the speed/indexing features I can get instead. If there are NO compromises, then of course encrypted notes are interesting.

Bitwarden’s indexes are instantaneous for me.

What use cases are knocking it over for you?

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

#139

Post by orthecreedence »

hedora wrote: post #137
orthecreedence wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly. However, they’re advertising a non-e2e app, and then incorrectly claiming they can legally provide this property.

OH I see what you're saying. Yes, they are legally overstepping here. The whole "trust us lol" thing is really getting old.

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

#140

Post by samsquire »

woojoo666 wrote: post #134
samsquire wrote: post #40

All 450+ of my journal entries, notes and computer ideas are unencrypted, public and shared and worked on in the open on GitHub, so are not encrypted except over TLS when I edit them on GitHub when logged in under my account samsquire If you like other people's technical perspectives are looking for ideas or side project ideas to learn of then read my journal For context I am a DevOps and software engineer interested…

Wow this is like an extreme version of "working in the open". If you don't mind me asking, do you have any private notes? Like maybe your workout notes or something? If so, what proportion of your notes would you say you keep private?

When I'm at working for or at a company I either use the company or client provided Wiki such as Confluence or knowledge base software. This is private to the company.

For quick notes I use notepad++ and VS Code.

If I were to join a project going forward I would create a journal directory in the repository and each day I would create a new document. I would move common reference commands and information to a separate file for easier reference.

I use a password database and I occasionally save plaintext .txt files to my OneDrive folder.

These are not encrypted but local to my computer but synced.

I create diagrams and GUI mockups with Evolus Pencil.

I have a Me folder for my CV/resume and saved invoices or saved purchase confirmation web pages or PDFs.

I also store notes in OmniNotes on Android phone. These are private.

What proportion of my notes are private?

There is far more public notes than private notes.

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