11 ms·

Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

140 points by fastball 4y ago

yokoprime 4y ago
I don't really care if anyone reads my todo.md and notes.md to be honest. But if I had to choose, I would choose end-to-end encrypted.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danielgh7 4y ago
A+
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  I think I would have only awarded an A+ if the conclusion was that their notes are actually E2EE encrypted! Good explanation though.
svacko 4y ago
My preference is to not need to care about what I'm pasting into my notes app. As I use the app on mobile, desktop OS and store not only organized content there, but also random thoughts, incl. sensitive content. That's I prefer to have it E2EE and use standardnotes.com (no affiliation, I'm just a happy customer)
- tekchip 4y ago
  Last I knew standard notes hid 2FA behind the paywall. Basic security should not be a pay feature. If they're willing to hang non-paying potential customers out to dry what other questionable security choices are they making? I tried to reason this out with them back when they had a discourse site or forum, I don't recall which it was, and was told, I'm paraphrasing, we're not going to do that and don't ever ask again with no good reasoning given. Not only a bad look from a security standpoint but also a bad look from a community engagement standpoint. IMO standard Notes is to be avoided.
  - jan_Inkepa 4y ago
    https://standardnotes.com/plans https://standardnotes.com/plans 2fa looks to be in the free plan now, fwiw. (long-term standard notes user here)
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    What if the entire app is behind a paywall, no free version at all? Is that also wrong?
  - puszczyk 4y ago
    What should they charge for then?
    - remram 4y ago
      They seem to charge $60/year for markdown (free plan only has plaintext). I wouldn't even want to evaluate it.
maksim-m 4y ago
> 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.
- break_the_bank 4y ago
  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.
  - BxGyw2 4y ago
    Yeah. It's called a web server and it's been around for ages, try it out some time
    - aliqot 4y ago
      > Yeah. It's called a web server and it's been around for ages, try it out some time come on, now.
      - inkblotuniverse 4y ago
        What?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - adripop 4y ago
      Relax
  - jmnicolas 4y ago
    IMHO this is not the role of a note app. For this, get a private blog or use Medium.
swah 4y ago
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.
- hedora 4y ago
  Bitwarden’s indexes are instantaneous for me. What use cases are knocking it over for you?
adastra22 4y ago
Great explanation of end-to-end encryption, followed by "but we're too lazy to do that." Not going to ever touch Supernotes now.
- fastball 4y ago
  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 better serve our users than E2EE, so we're prioritizing those for now (table stakes in the notes game are very high). But if I had infinite time at my disposal, I absolutely would add some form of E2EE – though still not sure I'd make it the default as again, there are some things you can't engineer your way out of when you add E2EE. The one that is most on my mind probably being irrecoverable data loss. If watching the cryptocurrency space over the last few years has taught me anything, it's that even if you beg people to take good care of secret/recovery keys, frequently they don't. And that's for stuff you can sell for actual money.
  - vbo 4y ago
    I don't think touting no E2EE is going to get you more users. Fine, don't do it, but I'm pretty sure the people who want E2EE (myself included) are likely very convinced it's what they need and will act accordingly. And those who don't care for E2EE won't care whether you offer it or not. Irrecoverable data loss is a real pain in the ass that needs to be dealt with but it's the only way to achieve true privacy. Knowing you can't decrypt my data whether by your own will or coerced by your government (which may or may not care about privacy now or in the future) or at the whim of a North Korean hacker, keeps my mind at ease. Why on earth would I give that up? Google has Keep, Apple has Notes, they do a pretty decent job as far as basic notes app go. Sorry if this sounds like putting you down, I'm sure you put a great deal of work into your app and you seem passionate about it and I'm sure it's great. But because the table stakes in the notes games are high, you need to go above and beyond what your competitors offer. Not just great UX, but pushing _every_ boundary in the space, including by offering privacy. I feel like in 2022, privacy is non-negotiable. Make it optional if you feel you must, or don't, but don't suggest skipping E2EE is in any way a virtue.
chrismorgan 4y ago
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 search and store an index, so your search can be done on a fast server, and you get a response in 100ms taking maybe 10kB of network traffic. With E2EE, all the server can do is hand you encrypted blobs. Maybe you have to download the full ten gigabytes, or maybe you also store the index and can download just that, which is probably smaller, but now you’ve got to do complicated index synchronisation when making changes (complicated because you want to minimise the amount of extra sync required). So your search now runs on your probably-slow phone processor and storage (we don’t all use iPhones), maybe takes a few seconds, and requires that you have downloaded (and store) maybe 10GB, maybe only 100MB, but a whole lot more. 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. I’m glad that they mentioned “In the end, trust is Still Required™”, and the last sentence of that section is good stuff. But I like to state it more strongly in two ways: if the software is served over the web or to any platform with automatic updates, E2EE is fundamentally broken; and, first-party end-to-end encryption is snake oil.
- thrwawy74 4y ago
  We've been hearing about homomorphic encryption for years, but I haven't seen it applied in a very practical way.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    When I last looked into fully homomorphic encryption in 2017, the algorithms were still not at an applicable place. Sure, we may have polynomial time algorithms for FHE, but it doesn't help anything in practice if those polynomials are not reasonable themselves.
threeseed 4y ago
> 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.
- xoa 4y ago
  Or for that matter someone who isn't an employee at all. Unless they're claiming they have figured out absolutely perfect security such that they can never be hacked or compromised. Or isn't an employee/manager right now, because the thing about companies is that they tend to grow and die, management changes over time, they get bought, etc. That's the human condition, we don't live forever. Really it's just a LUDICROUS statement to make. This isn't the 1980s, we know how tech works. We've seen tech companies around long enough for heroes to become villains and even heroes again, to watch all stages of lots of lifecycles happen over and over again, all the good and perverse incentives that can take place. To watch, well, decades. Just raw time. Even without centuries as in some industries, some basics are pretty clear at this point and one of them is that absolutely nobody can claim that data they have access too will "never be used" in one way or another given the pace of change and uncertainties of finances and even law. Notes tend to be things where people put in sensitive stuff, if only for scratch purposes. It's just inevitable, humans are humans. Or put in stuff they don't think is sensitive but who they're wrong, even security agencies can screw stuff like that up. A notes are a tiny amount of data by today's standards, handling everything client-side is not a big ask. So yeah, kind of a wow. Edit: another top conversation on HN literally right this instant is "“10% error rate is okay“ – Leaked EU Commission document regarding Chat Control"[0]. What happens when the law is changed such that all notes must be constantly scanned by AI for signs of criminal activity? ---- 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32562294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32562294
  - Shank 4y ago
    > Or for that matter someone who isn't an employee at all. Unless they're claiming they have figured out absolutely perfect security such that they can never be hacked or compromised. Or isn't an employee/manager right now, because the thing about companies is that they tend to grow and die, management changes over time, they get bought, etc. That's the human condition, we don't live forever. Exactly. The perception I have is that when you subscribe to a non-E2EE service, you're not subscribing to a service. You're actually placing a small bet on the service to: always keep all serverside components up-to-date, proactively monitor for vulnerabilities, proactively implement security controls at the company and technology level, always hire the absolute best engineers, etc. The problem is that every startup and every company always starts like this. Everyone has the best of intentions. Then the tech debt accumulates, the VC funding dries up, and time goes on. When the service is going to shut down, after being acquired, after being sold, or after being successful, will the serverside security still be perfect? You have two options: don't store anything sensitive in these services, or assume perfection. I definitely won't bet on the latter.
jcynix 4y ago
Hmm, here is someone who would have loved E2E for his emails (and images in the cloud): Google refuses to reinstate account after man took medical images of son’s groin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361 Given the tendency of large corporations to look into our private stuff, even on personal mobile devices (Hi Apple), encryption seems to be the only remedy. That is the reason why I store my (encrypted) notes with Joplin on my own server at Hetzner and it's the reason why I only buy smartphones which offer sd-card slots, so I can expand local storage instead of relying on someone's cloud storage.
- blfr 4y ago
  Google Photos whole premise is that they analyze, categorize, scan, and classify the photos for you. They find similar faces, put your photos on the Maps timeline, etc. If you don't want Google to do that, there's no point in using Google Photos. The entire benefit disappears.
  - secretary-horse 4y ago
    How about the ease of use and storage?
    - RedCary228 4y ago
      I'm sure ease of use would decrease if they introduce E2EE
imwillofficial 4y ago
I did not enjoy the attitude displayed in this article. Yes, notes, often containing the most sensitive material of our lives should be encrypted at every stage of the lifecycle.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  After seeing umpteen people at various large corps put a password into an unencrypted note over the years that's then stored on "the cloud", I think encryption should be standard.
coldtea 4y ago
>> Our team will never read or access your note content, unless we have received your express permission during a customer support interaction What a relief! I'd take it at their word then, trusting random employees at a random corporation, in a world where even police officers routinely get caught snooping at private data unrelated to their work (e.g. girlfriends and such). /s
- LtWorf 4y ago
  At this point, why even trust random corporation when they claim to be doing end to end encryption with some proprietary client?
amadeuspagel 4y ago
> 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?
- fastball 4y ago
  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?
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    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.
    - fastball 4y ago
      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.
  - longrod 4y ago
    In cyber security there's no such thing as 100% secure. There's insecure, secure, less secure, more secure etc. Always relative because security is not a concrete thing. You can't at any point say this app is 100% secure. That doesn't mean that the app is not 100% secure or that the app shouldn't use encryption since it can't be proven. 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. [0] https://vericrypt.notesnook.com/ https://vericrypt.notesnook.com/
lenova 4y ago
Standard Notes is a note taking app that provides end-to-end encryption: https://standardnotes.com/ https://standardnotes.com/
- hedora 4y ago
  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.
  - longrod 4y ago
    Maybe try Notesnook[0]? [0] https://notesnook.com/ https://notesnook.com/
  - orthecreedence 4y ago
    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.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Also it supports creating blogs from your notes https://listed.to/ https://listed.to/ And you can self host it too https://github.com/standardnotes/app https://github.com/standardnotes/app
upofadown 4y ago
Now that E2EE is considered a desirable thing, due to marketing, everything that does encryption of any sort is called E2EE. It doesn't really mean anything anymore.
XorNot 4y ago
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.
- trinsic2 4y ago
  Thanks for that. Been looking for something like this for a long time.
trinsic2 4y ago
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.
- fastball 4y ago
  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 priority. We've typically done the same thing when small businesses come our way and ask if Supernotes would be a good fit for their team: we tell them the team use-case is not our priority at the moment, so if that is a priority for them they would probably be better served by a shared workspace tool like Notion.
  - trinsic2 4y ago
    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.
    - klabb3 4y ago
      People DEFINITELY don't know what e2ee means, and it's wildly abused as a buzzword. Explaining what it is and what complementary requirements are necessary is just universally positive, no matter where in the privacy debate you sit.
samsquire 4y ago
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 in performance, distributed systems, parallelism, concurrency, futuristic GUIs, the future of programming, how computers can be used to improve society and community ideas. Ideas for Computing 2013 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas Ideas for Computing 2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 Ideas for Computing 3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 Ideas for Computing 4 (start here if you're interested in parallelism and concurrency and algorithms) https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 Startup ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups Since I'm still working on these journal entries, I don't want people to miss ideas I added if people don't come back so I create a new repository when I get to a certain number of journal entries and then announce them to others At some point I need to take a cut on ideas4
- woojoo666 4y ago
  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?
  - samsquire 4y ago
    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.
tobeagram 4y ago
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, trying to do both ease-of-sharing and end-to-end encryption (E2EE) right is a mammoth task, so we wanted to do one right, the social side of things. E2EE has become a buzzword for marketing for the last few years, but what's most concerning is how misunderstood it is. That's one of the main reasons why we decided to publish this article as we regularly received support interactions from customers mis-understanding encryption, with some asking whether we have "end-to-end encryption in transit" and "two factor encryption". This article is here to help the average (less tech savvy than HN) user better understand how encryption works so they can make a more informed choice whether Supernotes is right for them. We are not saying there are no reasons to use end-to-end encryption — there are a lot and other people have explained the obvious benefits quite well! The question is whether the increased effort and friction are worth it for your use case. If you want to quickly jot down and share your recipes, restaurant recommendations and startup ideas with your friends then Supernotes is for you. If you'd like to write down passwords, trade secrets, or your deepest darkest desires then we suggest using an alternative. [1] https://supernotes.app/features/friends https://supernotes.app/features/friends
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I'm not sure that social sharing of knowledge is what I want from a "notes" app. That sounds more like a text-based social media app.
- klabb3 4y ago
  I for one liked the article a lot, and I applaud you for doing the research and sharing it even if it's a negative result, especially with the HN crowd. Much more respect than what the majority does - plaster on some "military grade encryption" when they mean they have FDE or some other standard encryption at rest where they control the keys. Even better, educating the public about this. For my own venture (large file transfers) I went through very similar thoughts, but have decided to keep e2ee, but it's going to take a lot of time to see if it actually benefits my users. I've found that "going against the grain" with offline-first, e2ee etc is mostly a problem of immature off-the-shelf tooling, protocols and libraries. I.e. you need to put in a lot more work to build an equivalent product. Do you think that with a more mature ecosystem, you would have come to a different conclusion?
personjerry 4y ago
Pretty sure this is a clickbait ad
- wartijn_ 4y ago
  An ad maybe, it's clearly written by a company that has a note keeping app and they mention their app a few times. But I don't see how this is clickbait. The title asks if your notes should be encrypted, and the article does a pretty good job at explaining different kinds of encryption, what the company uses and why, seems like the opposite of clickbait to me.
EGreg 4y ago
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.
- crabmusket 4y ago
  Client must be open-source, and clients and servers must be interoperable.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    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.
    - longrod 4y ago
      You can't completely remove the trust factor no matter what you do. Can you completely 100% trust your computing device? Maybe. Can you 100% trust your network? Maybe. 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.
dominojab 4y ago
dirty_wipes 4y ago
lasereyes136 4y ago
Contrary to Betteridge's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... I would say the answer is maybe. Sure there are cases where it might make a big difference. Most cases it will not. The article does seem to educate people on what different encryption models mean, which is a good thing. People should know and understand what they signup to use and how control of it could be taken from them. Take it would a grain of salt, companies have lied about E2EE so the only way to know for sure is to do the encrypting yourself and stay on top of security flaws in your encryption software.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
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.
- longrod 4y ago
  Have you tried Notesnook [0]? It's pretty good and going open source this month. [0] https://notesnook.com/ https://notesnook.com/
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  Try Turtl (https://turtlapp.com 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).
upofadown 4y ago
Why the mention of forward secrecy? You can't be off the record when the whole point here is to make a record.
jrm4 4y ago
Bigger question for me. 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.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  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. I have more than one device and I'd like to be able to take notes on one and have them viewable/editable on the others. With E2EE, I don't have to trade this convenience for security.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    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.
    - Johnny555 4y ago
      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.
      - jrm4 4y ago
        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.
makach 4y ago
Yes. Encrypt everything everywhere always. It's easy.
longrod 4y ago
There are downsides to everything. This whole blog sounds like an excuse: "we don't want to apply E2EE because it can be a little inconvenient so we will just go ahead and store everything in plaintext because who cares!" 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.
bdominy 4y ago
I added end-to-end encryption to my contact information sharing app, Neucards, because it is a perfect fit for the technology - sensitive information that is useful when shared with friends and potentially valuable to 3rd parties or open to abuse. It took almost a year to add this feature working on my own, but I sleep better knowing everyone's information is protected.
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
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.
v4dok 4y ago
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.
- hedora 4y ago
  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-sessions/presentation/tang https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity17/technical...
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140 points by fastball 4y ago

I don't really care if anyone reads my todo.md and notes.md to be honest. But if I had to choose, I would choose end-to-end encrypted.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

danielgh7 4y ago

A+

tailspin2019 4y ago
I think I would have only awarded an A+ if the conclusion was that their notes are actually E2EE encrypted! Good explanation though.

svacko 4y ago

My preference is to not need to care about what I'm pasting into my notes app. As I use the app on mobile, desktop OS and store not only organized content there, but also random thoughts, incl. sensitive content. That's I prefer to have it E2EE and use standardnotes.com (no affiliation, I'm just a happy customer)

tekchip 4y ago
Last I knew standard notes hid 2FA behind the paywall. Basic security should not be a pay feature. If they're willing to hang non-paying potential customers out to dry what other questionable security choices are they making? I tried to reason this out with them back when they had a discourse site or forum, I don't recall which it was, and was told, I'm paraphrasing, we're not going to do that and don't ever ask again with no good reasoning given. Not only a bad look from a security standpoint but also a bad look from a community engagement standpoint. IMO standard Notes is to be avoided.
- jan_Inkepa 4y ago
  https://standardnotes.com/plans https://standardnotes.com/plans 2fa looks to be in the free plan now, fwiw. (long-term standard notes user here)
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  What if the entire app is behind a paywall, no free version at all? Is that also wrong?
- puszczyk 4y ago
  What should they charge for then?
  - remram 4y ago
    They seem to charge $60/year for markdown (free plan only has plaintext). I wouldn't even want to evaluate it.

maksim-m 4y ago

> 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.

break_the_bank 4y ago
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.
- BxGyw2 4y ago
  Yeah. It's called a web server and it's been around for ages, try it out some time
  - aliqot 4y ago
    > Yeah. It's called a web server and it's been around for ages, try it out some time come on, now.
    - inkblotuniverse 4y ago
      What?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - adripop 4y ago
    Relax
- jmnicolas 4y ago
  IMHO this is not the role of a note app. For this, get a private blog or use Medium.

swah 4y ago

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.

hedora 4y ago
Bitwarden’s indexes are instantaneous for me. What use cases are knocking it over for you?

adastra22 4y ago

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

fastball 4y ago
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 better serve our users than E2EE, so we're prioritizing those for now (table stakes in the notes game are very high). But if I had infinite time at my disposal, I absolutely would add some form of E2EE – though still not sure I'd make it the default as again, there are some things you can't engineer your way out of when you add E2EE. The one that is most on my mind probably being irrecoverable data loss. If watching the cryptocurrency space over the last few years has taught me anything, it's that even if you beg people to take good care of secret/recovery keys, frequently they don't. And that's for stuff you can sell for actual money.
- vbo 4y ago
  I don't think touting no E2EE is going to get you more users. Fine, don't do it, but I'm pretty sure the people who want E2EE (myself included) are likely very convinced it's what they need and will act accordingly. And those who don't care for E2EE won't care whether you offer it or not. Irrecoverable data loss is a real pain in the ass that needs to be dealt with but it's the only way to achieve true privacy. Knowing you can't decrypt my data whether by your own will or coerced by your government (which may or may not care about privacy now or in the future) or at the whim of a North Korean hacker, keeps my mind at ease. Why on earth would I give that up? Google has Keep, Apple has Notes, they do a pretty decent job as far as basic notes app go. Sorry if this sounds like putting you down, I'm sure you put a great deal of work into your app and you seem passionate about it and I'm sure it's great. But because the table stakes in the notes games are high, you need to go above and beyond what your competitors offer. Not just great UX, but pushing _every_ boundary in the space, including by offering privacy. I feel like in 2022, privacy is non-negotiable. Make it optional if you feel you must, or don't, but don't suggest skipping E2EE is in any way a virtue.

chrismorgan 4y ago

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 search and store an index, so your search can be done on a fast server, and you get a response in 100ms taking maybe 10kB of network traffic. With E2EE, all the server can do is hand you encrypted blobs. Maybe you have to download the full ten gigabytes, or maybe you also store the index and can download just that, which is probably smaller, but now you’ve got to do complicated index synchronisation when making changes (complicated because you want to minimise the amount of extra sync required). So your search now runs on your probably-slow phone processor and storage (we don’t all use iPhones), maybe takes a few seconds, and requires that you have downloaded (and store) maybe 10GB, maybe only 100MB, but a whole lot more. 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. I’m glad that they mentioned “In the end, trust is Still Required™”, and the last sentence of that section is good stuff. But I like to state it more strongly in two ways: if the software is served over the web or to any platform with automatic updates, E2EE is fundamentally broken; and, first-party end-to-end encryption is snake oil.

thrwawy74 4y ago
We've been hearing about homomorphic encryption for years, but I haven't seen it applied in a very practical way.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  When I last looked into fully homomorphic encryption in 2017, the algorithms were still not at an applicable place. Sure, we may have polynomial time algorithms for FHE, but it doesn't help anything in practice if those polynomials are not reasonable themselves.

threeseed 4y ago

> 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.

xoa 4y ago
Or for that matter someone who isn't an employee at all. Unless they're claiming they have figured out absolutely perfect security such that they can never be hacked or compromised. Or isn't an employee/manager right now, because the thing about companies is that they tend to grow and die, management changes over time, they get bought, etc. That's the human condition, we don't live forever. Really it's just a LUDICROUS statement to make. This isn't the 1980s, we know how tech works. We've seen tech companies around long enough for heroes to become villains and even heroes again, to watch all stages of lots of lifecycles happen over and over again, all the good and perverse incentives that can take place. To watch, well, decades. Just raw time. Even without centuries as in some industries, some basics are pretty clear at this point and one of them is that absolutely nobody can claim that data they have access too will "never be used" in one way or another given the pace of change and uncertainties of finances and even law. Notes tend to be things where people put in sensitive stuff, if only for scratch purposes. It's just inevitable, humans are humans. Or put in stuff they don't think is sensitive but who they're wrong, even security agencies can screw stuff like that up. A notes are a tiny amount of data by today's standards, handling everything client-side is not a big ask. So yeah, kind of a wow. Edit: another top conversation on HN literally right this instant is "“10% error rate is okay“ – Leaked EU Commission document regarding Chat Control"[0]. What happens when the law is changed such that all notes must be constantly scanned by AI for signs of criminal activity? ---- 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32562294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32562294
- Shank 4y ago
  > Or for that matter someone who isn't an employee at all. Unless they're claiming they have figured out absolutely perfect security such that they can never be hacked or compromised. Or isn't an employee/manager right now, because the thing about companies is that they tend to grow and die, management changes over time, they get bought, etc. That's the human condition, we don't live forever. Exactly. The perception I have is that when you subscribe to a non-E2EE service, you're not subscribing to a service. You're actually placing a small bet on the service to: always keep all serverside components up-to-date, proactively monitor for vulnerabilities, proactively implement security controls at the company and technology level, always hire the absolute best engineers, etc. The problem is that every startup and every company always starts like this. Everyone has the best of intentions. Then the tech debt accumulates, the VC funding dries up, and time goes on. When the service is going to shut down, after being acquired, after being sold, or after being successful, will the serverside security still be perfect? You have two options: don't store anything sensitive in these services, or assume perfection. I definitely won't bet on the latter.

jcynix 4y ago

Hmm, here is someone who would have loved E2E for his emails (and images in the cloud): Google refuses to reinstate account after man took medical images of son’s groin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361 Given the tendency of large corporations to look into our private stuff, even on personal mobile devices (Hi Apple), encryption seems to be the only remedy. That is the reason why I store my (encrypted) notes with Joplin on my own server at Hetzner and it's the reason why I only buy smartphones which offer sd-card slots, so I can expand local storage instead of relying on someone's cloud storage.

blfr 4y ago
Google Photos whole premise is that they analyze, categorize, scan, and classify the photos for you. They find similar faces, put your photos on the Maps timeline, etc. If you don't want Google to do that, there's no point in using Google Photos. The entire benefit disappears.
- secretary-horse 4y ago
  How about the ease of use and storage?
  - RedCary228 4y ago
    I'm sure ease of use would decrease if they introduce E2EE

imwillofficial 4y ago

I did not enjoy the attitude displayed in this article. Yes, notes, often containing the most sensitive material of our lives should be encrypted at every stage of the lifecycle.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
After seeing umpteen people at various large corps put a password into an unencrypted note over the years that's then stored on "the cloud", I think encryption should be standard.

coldtea 4y ago

>> Our team will never read or access your note content, unless we have received your express permission during a customer support interaction What a relief! I'd take it at their word then, trusting random employees at a random corporation, in a world where even police officers routinely get caught snooping at private data unrelated to their work (e.g. girlfriends and such). /s

LtWorf 4y ago
At this point, why even trust random corporation when they claim to be doing end to end encryption with some proprietary client?

amadeuspagel 4y ago

> 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?

fastball 4y ago
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?
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  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.
  - fastball 4y ago
    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.
- longrod 4y ago
  In cyber security there's no such thing as 100% secure. There's insecure, secure, less secure, more secure etc. Always relative because security is not a concrete thing. You can't at any point say this app is 100% secure. That doesn't mean that the app is not 100% secure or that the app shouldn't use encryption since it can't be proven. 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. [0] https://vericrypt.notesnook.com/ https://vericrypt.notesnook.com/

lenova 4y ago

Standard Notes is a note taking app that provides end-to-end encryption: https://standardnotes.com/ https://standardnotes.com/

hedora 4y ago
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.
- longrod 4y ago
  Maybe try Notesnook[0]? [0] https://notesnook.com/ https://notesnook.com/
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  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.
jacooper 4y ago
Also it supports creating blogs from your notes https://listed.to/ https://listed.to/ And you can self host it too https://github.com/standardnotes/app https://github.com/standardnotes/app

upofadown 4y ago

Now that E2EE is considered a desirable thing, due to marketing, everything that does encryption of any sort is called E2EE. It doesn't really mean anything anymore.

XorNot 4y ago

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.

trinsic2 4y ago
Thanks for that. Been looking for something like this for a long time.

trinsic2 4y ago

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.

fastball 4y ago
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 priority. We've typically done the same thing when small businesses come our way and ask if Supernotes would be a good fit for their team: we tell them the team use-case is not our priority at the moment, so if that is a priority for them they would probably be better served by a shared workspace tool like Notion.
- trinsic2 4y ago
  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.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    People DEFINITELY don't know what e2ee means, and it's wildly abused as a buzzword. Explaining what it is and what complementary requirements are necessary is just universally positive, no matter where in the privacy debate you sit.

samsquire 4y ago

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 in performance, distributed systems, parallelism, concurrency, futuristic GUIs, the future of programming, how computers can be used to improve society and community ideas. Ideas for Computing 2013 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas Ideas for Computing 2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 Ideas for Computing 3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 Ideas for Computing 4 (start here if you're interested in parallelism and concurrency and algorithms) https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 Startup ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups Since I'm still working on these journal entries, I don't want people to miss ideas I added if people don't come back so I create a new repository when I get to a certain number of journal entries and then announce them to others At some point I need to take a cut on ideas4

woojoo666 4y ago
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?
- samsquire 4y ago
  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.

tobeagram 4y ago

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, trying to do both ease-of-sharing and end-to-end encryption (E2EE) right is a mammoth task, so we wanted to do one right, the social side of things. E2EE has become a buzzword for marketing for the last few years, but what's most concerning is how misunderstood it is. That's one of the main reasons why we decided to publish this article as we regularly received support interactions from customers mis-understanding encryption, with some asking whether we have "end-to-end encryption in transit" and "two factor encryption". This article is here to help the average (less tech savvy than HN) user better understand how encryption works so they can make a more informed choice whether Supernotes is right for them. We are not saying there are no reasons to use end-to-end encryption — there are a lot and other people have explained the obvious benefits quite well! The question is whether the increased effort and friction are worth it for your use case. If you want to quickly jot down and share your recipes, restaurant recommendations and startup ideas with your friends then Supernotes is for you. If you'd like to write down passwords, trade secrets, or your deepest darkest desires then we suggest using an alternative. [1] https://supernotes.app/features/friends https://supernotes.app/features/friends

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I'm not sure that social sharing of knowledge is what I want from a "notes" app. That sounds more like a text-based social media app.
klabb3 4y ago
I for one liked the article a lot, and I applaud you for doing the research and sharing it even if it's a negative result, especially with the HN crowd. Much more respect than what the majority does - plaster on some "military grade encryption" when they mean they have FDE or some other standard encryption at rest where they control the keys. Even better, educating the public about this. For my own venture (large file transfers) I went through very similar thoughts, but have decided to keep e2ee, but it's going to take a lot of time to see if it actually benefits my users. I've found that "going against the grain" with offline-first, e2ee etc is mostly a problem of immature off-the-shelf tooling, protocols and libraries. I.e. you need to put in a lot more work to build an equivalent product. Do you think that with a more mature ecosystem, you would have come to a different conclusion?

personjerry 4y ago

Pretty sure this is a clickbait ad

wartijn_ 4y ago
An ad maybe, it's clearly written by a company that has a note keeping app and they mention their app a few times. But I don't see how this is clickbait. The title asks if your notes should be encrypted, and the article does a pretty good job at explaining different kinds of encryption, what the company uses and why, seems like the opposite of clickbait to me.

EGreg 4y ago

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.

crabmusket 4y ago
Client must be open-source, and clients and servers must be interoperable.
- EGreg 4y ago
  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.
  - longrod 4y ago
    You can't completely remove the trust factor no matter what you do. Can you completely 100% trust your computing device? Maybe. Can you 100% trust your network? Maybe. 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.

dominojab 4y ago

dirty_wipes 4y ago

lasereyes136 4y ago

Contrary to Betteridge's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... I would say the answer is maybe. Sure there are cases where it might make a big difference. Most cases it will not. The article does seem to educate people on what different encryption models mean, which is a good thing. People should know and understand what they signup to use and how control of it could be taken from them. Take it would a grain of salt, companies have lied about E2EE so the only way to know for sure is to do the encrypting yourself and stay on top of security flaws in your encryption software.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

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.

longrod 4y ago
Have you tried Notesnook [0]? It's pretty good and going open source this month. [0] https://notesnook.com/ https://notesnook.com/
orthecreedence 4y ago
Try Turtl (https://turtlapp.com 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).

upofadown 4y ago

Why the mention of forward secrecy? You can't be off the record when the whole point here is to make a record.

jrm4 4y ago

Bigger question for me. 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.

Johnny555 4y ago
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. I have more than one device and I'd like to be able to take notes on one and have them viewable/editable on the others. With E2EE, I don't have to trade this convenience for security.
- jrm4 4y ago
  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.
  - Johnny555 4y ago
    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.
    - jrm4 4y ago
      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.

makach 4y ago

Yes. Encrypt everything everywhere always. It's easy.

longrod 4y ago

There are downsides to everything. This whole blog sounds like an excuse: "we don't want to apply E2EE because it can be a little inconvenient so we will just go ahead and store everything in plaintext because who cares!" 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.

bdominy 4y ago

I added end-to-end encryption to my contact information sharing app, Neucards, because it is a perfect fit for the technology - sensitive information that is useful when shared with friends and potentially valuable to 3rd parties or open to abuse. It took almost a year to add this feature working on my own, but I sleep better knowing everyone's information is protected.

TheRealNGenius 4y ago

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.

v4dok 4y ago

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.

hedora 4y ago
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-sessions/presentation/tang https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity17/technical...

dorasmith011 4y ago

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