Comment by gepeto42
1 year ago
I completely agree with the threat model of "an attacker on your machine can get to the keys" but I'd like to add two security use cases that makes encrypting indexes valuable:
1. Off-the-shelf malware exfiltrates data, as seen in ransom attacks. I'd feel better if the index was encrypted. It's unlikely an attacker would manually spend time trying to find the keys in RAM unless your app became very famous :)
2. Syncing files on a work laptop where IT might snoop.
Obsidian does not encrypt files at all locally, and for that reason I would feel quite self-conscious about loading a vault with potentially private notes.
Ironically, Obsidian is much better if you only have ONE big vault, but because of this, I have to live with 3 vaults (different threat models for each).
im not the dev but what you're wanting is completely unreasonable. No note application does this and this would slow down the application without having any additional benefits
> No note application does this
Yes, the app Turtl (https://turtlapp.com) does do this and it's not slow at all really. It only decrypts data upon viewing, and immediately re-encrypts when saving data. So this is actually entirely reasonable and entirely doable. The benefits are that malicious applications can't read data just sitting on the hard drive, which removes an entire class of attacks. An encrypted hd doesn't help you when it's unlocked.
How would you search through thousands of notes? Decrypt them all in memory, search and encrypt them again? How does this scale with attachments?
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Are your notes really that interesting? I’ve written software that does this sort of thing commercially, if your materials are that sensitive you’d be using one of those packages.
I suspect this is just a dev with a fetish for obsessing over security. Like putting an expensive lock on a cheap bike!
FWIW emacs org mode, arguably one of the best note taking applications, supports gpg encrypted notes out of the box.