Encryption in JadeBook

As a Journal platform built by a single guy, the idea of security and encryption is probably interesting.

What's Encrypted?

Anything that could hold potentially sensitive information is encrypted. This includes:

• Journal title
• Journal content
• Notes
• Excerpt
• Summary

Whats a summary? When you memorise a journal entry, an AI summary is generated for the entry. The reason is that when the AI searches your entries, we don't want it scanning through potentially hundreds of entries, so the AI uses semantic search to pull all the documents for a search term and then uses the AI summary for initial context. At most, it'll hold roughly 100 characters of information.

For goals, the following are encrypted:

• Goal Title
• Goal Description
• Goal Logs

There are additional fields that are not encrypted. This could include dates, styles, tags, boolean values etc. These will never hold anything remotely considered `sensitive` and are store normally.

Encryption

So, how secure are journals? Well, it's uses AES-256 bit encryption during transit and at rest. We place security as a priority and make sure that we keep user data safe. That's also why saving AI chats is not a feature yet, we don't want to store stuff unless it's safe to do so.

Encryption vs Search

This is been quite a problem. The very nature of encryption means that it's virtually impossible to search. Which is why we generate a embeddings vector (a numerical representation of the content) which is then stored in way that negates potential security concerns.

However, semantic search isn't perfect. It stores very little actual data and is more like prediction rather than an actual text. Which is why you can choose what's more important to you.

You can `opt-out` of encryption which will allow you to use full-text search on unencrypted entries and increase performance since the encryption step is skipped. Encryption is turned on by default and is applied on the entry level, meaning you can choose what should or should not be encrypted.

However, the general recommendation is to keep the encryption turned on.