Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

https://supernotes.app/blog/posts/notes-end-to-end-encryption/

by fastball • 4 years ago

140 146 4 years ago

supernotes.app

danielgh7• 4 years ago

A+

tailspin2019• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

https://standardnotes.com/plans 2fa looks to be in the free plan now, fwiw. (long-term standard notes user here)

amadeuspagel3• 4 years ago

What if the entire app is behind a paywall, no free version at all? Is that also wrong?

puszczyk• 4 years ago

What should they charge for then?

maksim-m• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Yeah. It's called a web server and it's been around for ages, try it out some time

jmnicolas• 4 years ago

IMHO this is not the role of a note app. For this, get a private blog or use Medium.

secretary-horse2• 4 years ago

If you sign up for joplin cloud you can publish your notes. https://joplinapp.org/plans/

piaste• 4 years ago

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.

crabmusket3• 4 years ago

For this I use Standard Notes and Listed.to for E2EE encrypted writing as well as one-click sharing to either my little blog, or an anonymous link.

sodality2• 4 years ago

Trilium Notes offers this: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/

Note: I run a paid 3rd-party synchronization service for Trilium Notes that would offer the publishing part of what you mentioned easily, without setting up a cloud server: https://trilium.cc/

anthropodie• 4 years ago

Checkout Notable https://github.com/notable/notable

longrod6• 4 years ago

The best I have found so far is Notesnook Monographs [0].

[0] https://monograph.notesnook.com

swah• 4 years 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.

hedora5• 4 years ago

Bitwarden’s indexes are instantaneous for me.

What use cases are knocking it over for you?

adastra224• 4 years 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.

fastball6• 4 years 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.

vbo2• 4 years 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.

hammyhavoc2• 4 years ago

Beware the trickledown effect of who recommends software to non-techies.

panick21_3• 4 years ago

I would not use your app, but I understand the choice. Most important thing is to be honest about what you are offering.

adastra224• 4 years ago

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?)

samsquire5• 4 years ago

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.

adastra224• 4 years ago

I'm a professional cryptographer who has implemented E2EE.

chrismorgan4• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

We've been hearing about homomorphic encryption for years, but I haven't seen it applied in a very practical way.

polygamous_bat• 4 years 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.

coldtea2• 4 years 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.

That sounds like a feature...

chrismorgan4• 4 years ago

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 (or a not-much-lighter index), because downloading it takes a long time, costs a fair bit (traffic isn’t generally), and requires that I have that much spare space on whatever device I’m using at the time.

The fact of the matter is that E2EE in all its forms is consistently inconvenient—and double racheting makes it even worse than earlier non-key-cycling techniques. In some situations it may be worth the inconvenience, but I wish there was more acknowledgement of the fact that it’s seriously not the ideal goal, and I wish the innovation would head in the direction of proper and deliberately thorough decentralisation instead, because if you run your own server, you don’t need E2EE: its purpose disappears completely, leaving only the inconvenience. (Reduce it instead to just encryption at rest and transport encryption, which are still useful and entirely sufficient.)

pc86• 4 years ago

It is, and that's fine, but it's important to call out things like the search example above to people actually know what that means. There are some things where it's required, and some things where a 10x increase in how long it takes to do anything is not acceptable.

ilammy• 4 years ago

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...

yunohn2• 4 years ago

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

badrabbit• 4 years ago

Homomorphic search is a thing, new "web3" stuff shouldn't even store on a server, servers become app hosters and routers basically.

crabmusket3• 4 years ago

I pity the one who has 10GB of notes. It's a fair point though. E2EE is a tradeoff that may make sense in some cases but not others, and yes, it doesn't do away with the need for trust.

basilgohar• 4 years ago

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.

Technology happens in leaps and bounds and not at all uniformly, so this is a natural result. I personally am for the best of both worlds in whatever makes the most sense, but definitely skew towards privacy, security, and user-authority.

lasereyes1362• 4 years ago

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.

eduction• 4 years ago

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 about searching text notes. 10gb? That’s nearly 7 million pages of notes. Doesn’t seem a reasonable figure. Even hundreds of megs of text would require a lot of time to acquire and even that would rarely need to be downloaded in one go (new device).

2. The idea that tech that tends to live on the server is somehow magical. Search would take “a few seconds” on a “slow” phone processor you say. Phone professors are incredibly fast these days, but in any case, since when is text search slow? I feel like many developers treat text search as a scary magical black box but it’s rather straightforward. Read about inverted indexes and consider that the servers of the mid 90s were serving at least tens of thousands of text searchers apiece with processors probably slower than what’s in your phone. There are libraries you can use locally to make text search pretty trivial. Apple supports text search (spotlight) across the data and apps on your phone. It’s not rocket science.

3. The idea that anything other than conceptually perfect encryption is useless. “first-party end-to-end encryption is snake oil” - assuming you mean crypto where the user does not handle the keys directly and a first party causes them to be generated, first party e2ee describes some of the biggest privacy wins of the last 15 years - iMessage, FaceTime, Signal, WhatsApp.

sleepybrett• 4 years ago

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.

chrismorgan4• 4 years ago

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”.

sipjca• 4 years ago

I think this depends on if homomorphic encryption is feasible and fast. This would alleviate most of the concerns here.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

your probably-slow phone processor and storage

A $100 Android (terrible buy by the way, get a second hand top model instead, unless you're fussy about new features) still ships with a ridiculously fast CPU. The Motorola E6 Play comes with a MediaTek MT6739, a four year old bottle of the barrel phone CPU, and can still decrypt data at about 135MB/s. This thing is slow even in term of modern $100 Android devices, but it's not _that_ slow!

Stuffing everything behind E2EE with on-the-fly decryption without giving it a second thought is definitely a bad idea. Building an index isn't that hard, though, especially if you're probably not syncing your personal account between 20 devices if you're on a device like that. A good index may use tens of megabytes at most, which fits into the minimum RAM allocated towards an app on modern Android already. Traversing such an index shouldn't take long either. Sure, decrypting the found results may take a few hundred milliseconds, but the search itself shouldn't be a problem, should it?

I feel like we've all been spoiled by high performance electronics to the point where we don't realize the kind of power these devices have. SD cards come with their own ARM cores running at 100MHz or even multiples of that depending on the designed data rate; that's more than enough to do some indexing!

The difficult part is getting access to all that power. It means getting rid of the nice and handy frameworks (such as the Android SDK, high level programming languages such as Kotlin, and so on) and getting back to bare metal. Even writing this stuff in Rust may come with severe performance penalties because Rust is full of unexpected and unintentional issues; something like C++20 or Zig would be much better (or C if you really hate writing software).

I have an old tablet, a dual core 1GHz CPU. I installed LineageOS on it to get it to Android 7 so basic web functionality still works without too much effort. The flash storage of this thing is known to break down and it shows. Booting up is slow, animations stutter, the settings app hangs. You know what's not slow? Opening a web page in a web view. Latest version of Chrome, inside a minimal browser UI written in native code, runs great. Sure, video playback is crap because the GPU was bad even when it was new, but this thing can fetch megabytes of JSON over HTTP3 like a damn champ if you write software right. Processing is great, it just sucks at rendering (because the drivers have been monkey patched four Android versions above the last supported one). The experience is terrible because the software is heavy and written to make developers' lives easier, not to be efficient.

Don't be fooled by the electron applications 300MB note taking apps, "slow" chips are still very capable. Imagine how long even a mid-range phone's battery would last if apps were written to be as quick on my shitty tablet as the Lightning Browser is!

operator-name2• 4 years ago

if the software is served over the Web or to any platform with automatic updates, E2EE is fundimentallu broken; and, first-party end-to-end encryption is snake oil.

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.

kmeisthax• 4 years ago

First party E2EE has some value even under a "trusting trust" scenario: it lets service operators keep rogue employees from accessing your data. To compromise your data requires pushing a software update, which on pretty much every platform[0] creates a paper trail of cryptographic signatures leading back to the company's signing keys. If someone finds out about user data being stolen through a modified version of the app, that can be traced back to any developer who had access to key material.

Yes, if the organization itself decided to compromise its own scheme, E2EE cannot stop that... but again. That creates evidence and paper trails. The kinds of people with the power to do this want plausible deniability; the last thing they want is mathematical proof that they screwed their own customers on purpose. Same with that rogue employee: they don't want to be known as the guy who signed spyware.

[0] Yes, including sideloading-friendly ones. If your rogue update isn't signed it will trip a bunch of scary warnings at install time.

teleforce• 4 years ago

Personally I firmly believe that in the near future local-first software is going to be the main paradigm of Internet based applications, and end-to-end encryption will be its second nature [1].

From the seminal paper, "Local-first apps, on the other hand, have better privacy and security built in at the core. Your local devices store only your own data, avoiding the centralized cloud database holding everybody’s data. Local-first apps can use end-to-end encryption so that any servers that store a copy of your files only hold encrypted data that they cannot read".

[1] Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

brnt• 4 years ago

Remove the (implicit) third party server from your argument and it looks like your objection disappears.

I see no need to involve others in storing my notes.

candiodari• 4 years ago

Well this is what the TPM is supposed to solve. You want to trust the developer (after all if your client app is compromised, end-to-end encryption won't save you), but you don't want to trust the server, and physical access to the server doesn't get you any access to the data.

threeseed• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

Shank• 4 years 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.

hedora5• 4 years ago

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.)

orthecreedence5• 4 years ago

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

tshaddox2• 4 years ago

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.

panick21_3• 4 years ago

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.

jcynix• 4 years 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

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• 4 years 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-horse2• 4 years ago

How about the ease of use and storage?

imwillofficial• 4 years 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.

hammyhavoc2• 4 years 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.

coldtea2• 4 years 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).

LtWorf• 4 years ago

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

amadeuspagel3• 4 years 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?

fastball6• 4 years 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?

amadeuspagel3• 4 years 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.

longrod6• 4 years 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/

lenova• 4 years ago

Standard Notes is a note taking app that provides end-to-end encryption:

https://standardnotes.com/

hedora5• 4 years 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.

longrod6• 4 years ago

Maybe try Notesnook[0]?

[0] https://notesnook.com/

orthecreedence5• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Also it supports creating blogs from your notes

https://listed.to/

And you can self host it too

https://github.com/standardnotes/app

upofadown2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

trinsic23• 4 years ago

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

trinsic23• 4 years 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.

fastball6• 4 years 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.

trinsic23• 4 years 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.

samsquire5• 4 years 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

Ideas for Computing 2

https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2

Ideas for Computing 3

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

Startup ideas

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

woojoo6663• 4 years 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?

samsquire5• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

pclmulqdq• 4 years 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.

klabb32• 4 years 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?

orthecreedence5• 4 years ago

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.

personjerry• 4 years ago

Pretty sure this is a clickbait ad

wartijn_• 4 years 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.

EGreg2• 4 years 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.

crabmusket3• 4 years ago

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

EGreg2• 4 years 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.

yokoprime• 4 years 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.

lasereyes1362• 4 years ago

Contrary to Betteridge's law 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• 4 years 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.

longrod6• 4 years ago

Have you tried Notesnook [0]? It's pretty good and going open source this month.

[0] https://notesnook.com/

orthecreedence5• 4 years ago

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).

upofadown2• 4 years ago

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

jrm43• 4 years 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.

Johnny5552• 4 years 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.

jrm43• 4 years 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.

makach• 4 years ago

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

longrod6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

hedora5• 4 years 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...

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Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?

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