Is there a way to develop and website using JS (and perhaps PHP) to create an E2EE website. Were all packets sent between the server and the userw device are E2EE, wrapped in a layer of encryption?
I know there is HTTPS but I am looking for something stronger than HTTPS.
By using some JS or PHP E2EE package, would I have to write or structure the website code very differently than you normally would?
Unless you want to go with multiple layers of encryption, there is nothing significantly “stronger” than TLS 1.3 at the moment. And multiple layers are only used for anonymity, for example in Tor. Having multiple layers between just two endpoints without intermediary steps does not make anything significantly better.
Other examples include mega, which encrypts all files it stores for clients on the client side, and then never transfers the key. This way, the client’s data is E2EE in the sense that only the people with the link can read it, but the mega servers can’t.
Mega is a good example of what I want to learn to create. Not just to transfer files, but for what text is displayed on the page and the form field values and have it so that the server admins cannot decrypt and is encrypted this data in transit.
I mean, the server would need to have the private keys in order to encrypt the data right
The idea is that the keys are client-side. You send them to the server encrypted, and it serves it back to other clients who have the password entirely client-side as well, and decrypts it.
It’s basically what encrypted chat apps do: all they have is metadata but the payload is completely opaque to the server. It could just be a file of
/dev/urandomfor what it knows.I had no idea mega did that, that’s awesome. The whole idea that the server doesn’t have the key, like – it’s so simple, but it never occurred to me. Why would the server ever need to decrypt it?
This shit is wrinkling my brain.
And I’m even more mad at every cloud provider. Why you decrypting my shit, Google?
So I guess the question is, for your site idea, where does the encryption start? Like, you want the text on the page and the form data encrypted, but, is the text on the form’s submit button encrypted? If it is, your user has to be a developer to some extent, or you needs to build like a WordPress style wysiwyg editor that also encrypts everything – and, like, that’s kinda cool, but actually writing that code sounds like torture. I’d rather spend all that development time giving myself papercuts and squirting lemon juice into them.
So an encryption “barrier” has to exist. The Mega server doesn’t decrypt your file, but it knows that it’s getting a file of some kind for you, and it knows the shape of the data. It’s not completely ignorant – and, like the WordPress problem above, you could prevent that – keep the server from even knowing what it’s doing – again, kinda cool, but it sounds like torture to actually write.
So the question is, where are you putting that barrier? It seems like, wherever that barrier is, is also how deep a non-developer user can get into using it. To put that another easy: the more of the site’s content that’s encrypted, the more development skills the user has to have.
Or I’m just misunderstanding your project entirely, which I will attribute to the fact that it’s 1am.
Mega uses your account password to decrypt a master key, they only store the encrypted master key on the servers. And all the files you upload and download are decrypted with the same key, and the password never leaves your browser. Thus Mega doesn’t have any visibility in the contents of the files and doesn’t have the ability to decrypt the key nor the files.
It’s fully transparent to the user, no skills required. It pretty much just works. The only downside is if you lose your password your files are gone, there’s no password recovery. And of course if your password leaks, 2FA doesn’t get you very far.
And it’s an extremely bad customer experience to be unable to restore your user’s files, so it doesn’t get used that often because users don’t care. They trust the company and don’t care how safe or unsafe it is, but they want their files to be there without hassles.