Tuesday, October 17th, 2006p>Halfnote is a web based secure notepad created by Aaron Boodman.
Aaron created this originally to allow him to share documents between his own computers in a secure manner.
The web application uses local storage in IE 5+ and Firefox 2 to store an encryption key. This means that your notes are encrypted with a key that never leaves your machine.
In traditional web applications your data is not encrypted at all. It’s sitting there on the server in plaintext for all to see. If the provider screws up, your data will be leaked, for example what happened with AOL.
Even if it were encrypted, you’d either have to enter the key every time you wanted to view the data, or else store the key on the server, which would defeat the purpose of encrypting it in the first place.
Local storage offers a way around this issue, and I wrote halfnote as a sort of proof of concept for client side encryption in web applications.
- Client-side encryption. Your notes are strongly encrypted with your account password before they leave your browser. Even if I totally screw up someday and pull an AOL, your data will remain pretty safe.
- Auto-save. Save buttons are lame. Halfnote saves your notes automatically whenever you stop typing.
- Synchronization. You can have Halfnote open on multiple computers and they will stay in sync with each other. You don’t have to worry about accidentally overwriting notes you entered on another computer.
Posted by Dion Almaer at 12:13 pm