An end-to-end encrypted web app

github.com

1 pointDVassallo2 comments

That’s a pretty dangerous idea. It may seem to user that they are safe from server compromise or government investigation, but this is not the case. The code is shipped every time, which means that hackers will modify the code to exfiltrate users’ keys, and governments will make developer do that.

See the story of hushmail and feds for an example.

There are ways to address that: One of them is to provide a downloadable copy of the web app. Another is to offer a browser extension to verify integrity. Here's an example from Cloudflare (https://blog.cloudflare.com/e2e-integrity/).

But even without code integrity checks, client-side encryption of user data should still radically improve user data privacy compared to the status quo of storing it in clear in a database owned by the app developer.

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