[jdvh]

I know I'm biased because I'm working on an E2EE todo/planning app[1], but over the years I've become convinced that E2EE apps are the future.

All the syncing code you have to write anyway if you want your app to work offline. Despite all the buzz about big data, most individuals and most companies generate only a modest amount of data. Even when you have a long tail of archived data (e.g. emails that go back 10 years) the key benefit is in having all recent data with you, available offline, and end-to-end encrypted.

Self-hosting is a lot more difficult in practice than in theory. Somebody has to make backups, maintain a server architecture with redundancy, apply security patches, etc. For hobby purposes you can get away with just not doing any of that, but for businesses and people who don't want to tinker with their own servers outsourcing all this makes a ton of sense.

I don't agree with your claims that traffic is expensive. In any case, downloading data once and syncing subsequent deltas is still a lot more data efficient than roundtripping JSON for every user action.

[1] https://thymer.com

[geoduck14]

Ok, I'll byte. Let's take a hypothetically example that might just happen.

Imagine a company has a Wikipedia hosted by a 3rd party. I interpret E2EE as: after I submit a post, it is encrypted, and the servicing company can't look at the unencrypted data, my coworkers can decrypt the posts.

It is simple to ask "how would you support linking to posts" - but "how would you support searching for posts"?

Would you maintain a key-value lookup list? Would you handle semantic search? Are there E2EE algorithms that facilitate enhanced searching?

[danielheath]

So, searching through encrypted text is a really interesting problem!

It's actually possible under some ciphers / search algorithms - if the client generates encrypted inverted index entries when submitting a post, and encrypts their (vectorized) search query using the same key, the server can compare them and return a scored list of IDs.

You do need to weaken the encryption scheme somewhat - in particular, term-frequency analysis becomes possible.

[CRConrad]

> Ok, I'll byte.

Whether it was intentional or not, +1 Funny.

[throwaway888abc]

That's looks pretty cool. Looking forward for invite. Just signed up.