Encryptipn

[SwedishAuthor]

With a growing interest for saving to the cloud the question of keeping the information safe also becomes increasingly important. It is not only employees that might be snooping around. There is also "Big Brother" watching you, not to mention the possibility of industrial espionage. Any professional writing app must have an encryption sub routine. 

I would really like to see the text beeing encrypted in my Storyist projects rather then trusting someone claiming the text is somehow protected in the cloud. This means that Storyist must support uploading manually to Dropbox, iCloud etc. (1 encrypt, 2 upload).

[Sisca]

I'm sorry but if you're truly worried about the security of your writing then you really shouldn't be storing it in the cloud. If you insist on storing sensitive data in the cloud then I think it should be up to you, the user, to insure that it is properly safeguarded.

 

As far as I know Dropbox is pretty safe. They use SSL and AES 256 encryption to send the files and they do everything in their power to protect them once they have them. If you wanted an added layer of protection you could use something like TrueCrypt to create an encrypted "disk" as a file in your Dropbox directory and then upload that. Of course then you might not be able to access the file on a device such as the iPad.

 

There are some new Dropbox like services that are starting to appear that offer Pre-Internet Encryption, Spideroak is one that comes to mind. With Pre-Internet Encryption the file is encrypted on your computer before it is uploaded to their servers. While it would be nice if the Storyist iPad app could support such a service it runs into the same problem that you have with the TrueCrypt solution above. You have to have the ability to decrypt the file once you download it.

 

Encryption and decryption is not a trivial problem to solve. Going out and grabbing some freely available library isn't really a good answer since you're then counting on them to provide security for your customers, not to mention the potential licensing issues when you get into open source libraries.

 

Personally if someone wants to go through the hassle of breaking into my private Dropbox and rummaging around to read the stuff I put there they're welcome to it.

[SwedishAuthor]

It is not only comfortable to sync, it is safer in case I might loose the device. I want it!

But suppose I am a journalist with sensitive information e.g. information stating that president Obama was born in Indonesia. I do not care if it is the Democrats or the Republicans sending out spiders on the net or if it is CIA, NSA, Homeland Security or whatever. You have heard of Echelon and Watergate?

I do not feel safe until I have an encryption with my password. Encrypting the stuff before sending it anywhere.

 

Hardware encryption is not safe, just faster then encrypting with software.

Your next president could be a J. Edgar Hoower, Joseph McCarty or Adolf Hitler! Then what?

[pmackim]

Encryption might be a good "pay extra" option... Most folks wouldn't use it but some of us would love to make our enemies use up all their supercomputing resources to read our stuff... Personally, I'm having enough trouble getting people to read mine for free but I guess that's because I don't know any good secrets.

[thewitt]

Please make sure you prioritize this correctly.

 

Seriously.

 

If you are using Storyist to edit documents that require encryption before uploading to a cloud service, you should really put another layer of aluminum foil on your hat and change your cell phone number again.....

 

Sorry. I just can't take this "big brother is watching" stuff seriously.